Interzone 128 [1998-02] (Bogof39)

FEBRUARY 1998

770264 359183

Keith Brooke

Alastair Reynolds

Elizabeth Counihan

and an interview with

Stephen Gallagher

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Editor & Publisher

David Pringle
Deputy Editor
Lee Montgomerie
Assistant Editors
Paul Annis,
Andy Robertson,
Andrew Tidmarsh
Consultant Editor
Simon Ounsley
Advisory Editors
John Clute,
Malcolm Edwards,
Judith Hanna
Graphic Design and Typesetting
Paul Brazier
Subscriptions Secretary
Ann Pringle

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Vignettes by SMS

science fiction & fantasy

CONTENTS

Fiction

ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

On the Oodnadatta

Illustrated by Russell Morgan

6

TANITH LEE

The Girl Who Lost Her Looks

21

DOUGLAS SMITH

New Year’s Eve

31

KEITH BROOKE

Resting Place

37

ELIZABETH COUNIHAN

Fairest Isle

47

Features

INTERACTION

Readers’ Letters

4

RETURN TO THE NIGHTMARE COUNTRY

Steve Gallagher interviewed by David Mathew

19

NICK LOWE

Mutant Popcorn Film reviews

27

WENDY BRADLEY

Tube Corn TV reviews

29

GARY WESTFAHL

Why the Stars are Silent:

the Decline of the SF Monomyth

43

DAVID LANGFORD

Ansible Link

53

JOHN CLUTE, PAUL McAULEY, CHRIS GILMORE, DAVID MATHEW,
NEIL JONES & NEIL MclNTOSH, AND BRIAN STABLEFORD

Book reviews

Order them from the address above.

Submissions:
stories, in the 2,000-6,000 word range,
should be sent singly and each one
must be accompanied by a stamped
self-addressed envelope of adequate
size. Persons overseas please send a
disposable manuscript (marked as
such) and two International Reply
Coupons. We are unable to reply to
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No responsibility can be accepted for
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howsoever caused. Submissions should
be sent to the Brighton address above.

Cover by Maurizio Manzieri

Published monthly. All material is © Interzone, 1998, on behalf of the various contributors

ISSN 0264-3596

Printed by KP Litho Ltd, Brighton

Trade distribution: Diamond Magazine Distribution Ltd.,
Unit 7, Rother Ironworks, Fishmarket Road, Rye,

East Sussex TN31 7LR (tel. 01797 225229).

Bookshop distribution: Central Books,

99 Wallis Rd., London E9 5LN (tel. 0181 986 4854).

I heartily share David Burrows’s out¬
rage (“Interaction,” IZ 124) at Gol-
lancz’s failures on behalf of M. John
Harrison’s superb Signs of Life. I
should point out however that not
only was I able to buy two copies of
the novel in Hatchard’s, but when I
asked for it there - having already
looked under sf and general fiction -
the assistant recommended it enthu¬
siastically.

They’d put it in the thriller section
because they thought that’s where it
had the best chance. In Manchester
Dave Britton, Mike Butterworth and
others were able to buy several
copies in Waterstones, and elsewhere
others were able to find it in most
large Dillons and Waterstones. More
than one person reports similar
enthusiasm for the book in the shop
itself. This looks like a further
demonstration of what we’re seeing
increasingly - unlike publishers, by
now irredeemably concerned with
their corporate convulsions, the book¬
sellers and their readers are still
pretty much living in the real world.

For all this year’s familiar com¬
plaints from the Booker judges about
how 1997 was a poor year for fiction,

I believe it’s actually been a very
good year for fiction in the real world.
Signs of Life, perhaps Harrison’s
finest novel so far, made it an out¬
standing one.

C’est la guerre.

Hasta la vista!

Mike Moorcock
Lone Pines, Texas

Dear Editors:

While David Burrows is entitled to his
opinion of our publication of Mike
Harrison’s Signs of Life (IZ 124), there
are various wrong assumptions in his
letter which need to be corrected
before they become accepted fact.

Signs of Life was commissioned in
August 1992 by the late Richard
Evans as the first book in a two-book
contract, the typescript to be deliv¬
ered no later than December 31,

1993. Gollancz then sold paperback
rights on to Malcolm Edwards at
Flamingo (HarperCollins), largely
because Malcolm had been Richard’s
predecessor as Mike’s editor and

+ Interaction +

wanted to remain involved. When the
typescript was delivered in December
’95, almost exactly two years late,
Richard had come to feel that Mike
more properly belonged in the more
“literary” end of the list, which I took
over in ’94. (I know, I know, but it’s
what Richard thought, all right?)

As someone who would happily
abolish hardbacks altogether if he
could, I was naturally disappointed to
discover that we could only publish
Signs of Life in hardcover, especially
since I was busy planning for what
was to become the Indigo list. Never¬
theless I was happy to be Mike’s edi¬
tor. But you have to be realistic: of
course the book’s main market is in
paperback; as Mr Burrows says him¬
self, “Booksellers won’t buy in a hard¬
back of that price unless they know it
will sell (or are certifiably insane, or
know excellent alternative fiction
when they see it).” (Is it, by the way,
really fair to blame publishers for
this state of affairs? You might as
well say, “If only the public got off
their arses and bought more books we
could make them cheaper.”) But a
contract is a contract, according to
which Signs of Life should be appear¬
ing as a Flamingo paperback some
time next spring, presumably plas¬
tered with all the terrific reviews the
hardback has received.

One last point, contrary to what Mr
Burrows suggests, the Gollancz arse
is trim and streamlined and not at all
outdated, and we get off it frequently.
Mike Petty

Victor Gollancz Ltd, London
Dear Editors:

Laurie Jones’s letter in issue 125
caught my attention, if only because I
personally am rather fond of alternate-
history stories. Your reply was clear
enough, but there are also a couple of
other things that I think need saying.

Of course, alternate histories have a
long and continuing existence outside
the sf genre, both as literary devices
for “mainstream” novelists and as
amusements and thought-experiments
for professional historians. However,
they also have a respectable place
within the genre - or rather, within
the twin genres of sf and fantasy,
which are Interzone’ s declared subject.

To begin with, there is a rather
crude technical element. As soon as
writers began treating time-travel at
all seriously, the possibility of chang¬
ing the past - and hence of creating an
alternative history - came into play.
There are stories in which the time-
travel (which I think is universally
accepted as an sf subject) is the kernel
of the plot, and an alternate history is
a passing consequence thereof. Simi¬
larly, writers may wave their hands a

Interaction +

little over ideas from quantum
mechanics, and work from there into
stories of “cross-time” adventure. But
other writers may become happily
engaged in the alternate history itself.

So an sf writer who wants to write
an alternate history story may frame
it with a paragraph or two in which
some time-traveller squashes a
neolithic butterfly, and then returns
“home” to discover the consequences,
or with a dry filing-index entry from
some Bureau of Cross-Temporal
Observation. A “mainstream” writer
is less likely to bother with such
tricks. But if we are too picky in our
definitions of sf, we end up insisting
that the framing paragraphs drag
the story in or out of the genre -
which strikes me as clumsy.

But I’m more interested in the
question of whether an alternate his¬
tory is inherently sf. The question
could be - is history a science? That’s
a matter of semantics; I don’t think
that it is, really, but it is an orga¬
nized and rationalizable field of
study, and hence is susceptible to the
kind of thought-experiments that sf
traditionally applies to physics or
engineering or anthropology. On
those terms, alternate histories are
the hard sf of historical “science.”

Actually, though, I think that alter¬
nate histories cover a range from fan¬
tasy to quasi-hard sf. At one end of the
scale are exhibits such as Newman
and Byrne’s “USSA” stories. I’m not as
taken with these as some people, but I
recognize what they are doing; essen¬
tially, they are pop-culture fantasies,
playing games with our ideas of the
world and its inhabitants. Paul Di Fil¬
ippo’s “The Happy Valley at the End of
the World,” which also appeared in IZ
125, is further into the sf category; its
point of divergence is a little implausi¬
ble, and its atmosphere is a little
dreamlike, but it is nonetheless about
historical people reacting semi-plausi-
bly to its divergent history. And at the
hard-sf end of the scale sits Stephen
Baxter and Simon Bradshaw’s “Pros-
pero One” (IZ 112), with its worked-
through depiction of a UK space
programme that might have been.

And I suppose that this continuum
is one of the fascinating things about
alternate history; it runs from the bor¬
ders of elfland fantasy to the common
rooms of academia. (Hugh Trevor-
Roper apparently said that “History is
not merely what happened: it is what
happened in the context of what might
have happened. Therefore it must
incorporate, as a necessary element,
the alternatives, the might-have-
beens.”) Long may Interzone support it.
Phil Masters

Home Page: http:! Iourworld.compu
serve, com / homepages / Phil_Masters

Dear Editors:

On the subject of mainstream writers
of sf (following the discussion in IZ
125): some time ago I received a copy
of Twenty Twenty by Nigel Watt to
review for my local paper. As I
haven’t re-read in the three years
since my memory is slightly sketchy.
My strongest impression was that it
wasn’t just a “literary” novel in sf
clothing but a genuine, intelligent
science-fiction novel. Though using
two sf standards, virtual reality and
future plague, the author seemed to
have an awareness of the genre
unlike, say, Paul Theroux in O-Zone.

A very impressive novel, especially
for a first sf work.

Martin Lewis
Bradford

Dear Editors:

I’ve just read Katherine Roberts’s let¬
ter (issue 125) about your publication
of my “The Grass Princess.” I’m glad
Katherine liked the story so much, but
I don’t know if I’d want to see more
stories very like “The Grass Princess”
in Interzone. I only suggested it to the
editors because of the World Fantasy
Award. Having read her letter I took
another look at the contents of issue
125 of IZ, featuring a fable about
Death, an alternate history about leg¬
endary aviator Antoine de St-Exupery,
another fable about death (and heav¬
enly visions) and, let me see, some¬
thing poetic about extinction events?

The magazine’s boundaries already
seem fairly permeable. I only wish
more women, not fewer, could man¬
age to tough it out and publish sci¬
ence fiction novels instead of media
tie-ins, fantasy or “dark fantasy.” But
that’s probably not going to happen
within the genre. The climate is just
not right in this country. As to why
this should be: any thoughts of seri¬
alizing C. P. Snow, dear editors?
Gwyneth Jones
Brighton

Dear Editors:

Alison Page (“Interaction,” IZ 125)
either doesn’t understand or disre¬
gards my artistic (as opposed to polit¬
ical) objection to Ian Watson on the
Belgrano, but her suggestion that the
sinking may have profoundly affected
the outcome of the Falklands War
and by direct consequence that of the
next general election in the UK has
substance. How about this scenario:

Belgrano is loftily allowed to escape
the war zone, as not being worth pow¬
der and shot. Outside, it makes ren¬
dezvous with the single Argentine
aircraft carrier (which in reality
never left port, possibly because its
engines were US). They sneak back
into the zone, and between them sink
or incapacitate Invincible.

That renders the Task Force inca¬
pable of completing its task, and what
remains of it limps home, leaving
some scores of soldiers to be ransomed

at humiliating expense via the Red
Cross. Mrs Thatcher comes under
attack from the right of her party (for
not winning the war by direct or indi¬
rect use of the nuclear option) and
from the left (for not giving Galtieri
what he wanted under the best figleaf
negotiable) and kills herself/has a ner¬
vous breakdown/is dismissed as party
leader and has no option but to resign
as premier. The new premier Whitelaw/
Howe/Heseltine either loses a vote of
censure or calls a general election in
order to avoid one. Michael Foot is
returned on much the same manifesto
that he presented in 1983, with the
sort of majority Tony Blair now
enjoys. (It’s widely believed (but
impossible to prove) that Galtieri was
in such a hurry to invade because he
knew Thatcher was unpopular, and
was keen to achieve a fait accompli
before the UK came under the control
of such an unequivocally masculine
man as Michael Foot.)

Now let someone write a novel/
novella/whatever, about the next five
years in the UK, from whatever politi¬
cal perspective he/she likes. Better still,
let’s have several, covering the whole
range from (say) Poumelle to Watson.
Chris Gilmore

Dear Editors:

Re: the naff practice of sticking chap¬
ters of forthcoming books at the ends
of books (“Books Received,” IZ 125,
p65); I wish this were confined to Star
Trek novels and their ilk, but sadly it
isn’t - for instance it seems to be very
common in US editions of crime nov¬
els. To take one example, by relatively
classy writer James Hall, I recently
finished one of his novels only to find
(on reading the free chapter - wish I
hadn’t now!) that the main character’s
love interest cops it in the next book -
doh! Sort of spoiled the enjoyment of
the one I’d just finished. As you imply,
it’s a bit of swindle really.

Alastair Reynolds
Netherlands

Dear Editors:

It was very satisfying to read Nick
Lowe putting the boot into the makers
of Contact (“Mutant Popcorn,” IZ 126).
I was ready to forgive them almost
anything: the schmaltzy music, the
cute-ified childhood flashbacks, the
recycled Clinton speech about the
Antarctic/Martian meteorites (as if no
one would remember), even lumbering
poor Jodie Foster with that wooden
one-night stand when she should have
been ignoring the sign they hung
around her blind colleague’s neck that
read “No sex please, I’m disabled.” I
was prepared to forgive them all of it,
for the sake of the things they got
right: the opening tracking shot away
from the Earth (never mind that they
fudged the radio signals and made
Jupiter seem light years away, it still
worked); Foster shouting real jargon
full of right ascensions and declina¬

tions as she rushed to the telescope
control room when the signal from
Vega came through; the moment of
sheer atheistic courage, the triumph of
curiosity over terror, as she sat in the
aliens’ machine reciting, over and over
through the static, that she was ready
to go.

But the ending was unforgivable.
Beyond all issues of the lack of respect
for Sagan and Druyan, it was the most
contrived, intellectually dishonest
betrayal of the audience imaginable.
What a pack of worthless whores.

Best wishes.

Greg Egan
Perth, Australia

Dear Editors:

I was interested in Brian Stableford’s
article on Hugo Gemsback in IZ 126.

I have a lot of respect for Brian’s
writings, and he’s usually meticulous
in his research, but for the first time
ever in reading one of his pieces I
found myself shaking my head on
more than one occasion and becom¬
ing a little despondent.

I spent several years researching
and writing a book about Gerns-
back’s contribution to sf - The Gerns-
back Days - which would have been
published by Starmont House some
years ago had it not been for the
unfortunate death of publisher Ted
Dikty. The book’s been with Borgo
Press ever since and I hope it will be
out next year. In producing that book
I read through all the issues of all of
Gernsback’s pr e-Amazing technical
magazines and have copies of all of
the stories and most of the specula¬
tive science articles. So when Brian
says on p48 that “there is no conspic¬
uous evidence that Gernsback had
any interest in science fiction per se”

I find myself wondering about the
depth of Brian’s research. The argu¬
ment hinges, no doubt, on the use of
the phrase “science fiction,” but it is
evident from the rest of the article
that Brian is emphasizing the scien¬
tific basis of sf - he talks elsewhere
about Amazing’s “noble ambition” as
perhaps being non-evident and also
about Campbell’s approach to sf
being from a more scientific base.

It is evident to me that Brian has
not had the opportunity to work
through Gemsback’s entire publishing
corpus. If he had the evidence would
have struck him forcibly. I won’t go
into it all here - my book follows that
thread throughout - but I cannot
emphasize too strongly that Gems¬
back was a total devotee of science fic¬
tion, and in his use of the phrase it
meant fiction that inspired readers to
explore the potential of science. Most
of the early stuff he published in Elec¬
trical Experimenter and Science &
Invention was deliberately “experi¬
menter” fiction or gadget fiction, and
certainly has little in common with sf

letters continue on page 30

February 1998

H e was staring into the distance, doing his best
not to catch anyone’s eye, but not wanting to sit
scrutinizing his coffee like some mestizo kid
avoiding trouble. Muller didn’t especially care whether
he walked into it or not. What he didn’t like was find¬
ing it in a place where he hadn’t yet sussed the peck¬
ing order; who he could and couldn’t trust.

Luckily, enough was happening to justify his gaze.
Through the roadhouse’s big window, twin-prop
planes were coming and going from the adjacent
airstrip. Trucks as well; the road trains came through
here on their way to the Cadman stock stations strung
out along the Birdsville Track, or south to Adelaide. In
daylight, trailing plumes of dust, the trains seemed to
take forever to come and go - but it was getting toward
dusk now - the sky purple, washed by streaks of orange
behind the mulga trees - and the trains only turned on
their headlights near settlements.

“Wakey,” the man said, snapping his fingers in front
of Muller’s eyes. “Cadman doesn’t pay you to daydream,
mate.”

The man was hatted, his wiry form almost lost in a
checked zip-up jacket with a fleeced collar.

“Mr Rawlinson?”

The man decommissioned Muller’s coffee dregs into
a nearby pot plant. “But you can call me Rawlinson.
Got your gear, have you? There’s a plane waiting for us.
Some old girl’s conked out on the Oodnadatta.”

Muller snatched his grip and toolkit from under the
table. “A road train?”

“Yeah, a road train. Not that we get much else out
here, you know.” Rawlinson walked to the despatch
desk and picked up a couple of dockets. “Sign yourself
out mate.”

Muller wrote his name carefully in the log book,
Rawlinson looking over his shoulder. “Juan Muller,”
said the big Australian. “What are you, some kind of
mongrel? Had you down for a Kraut. Look like you’ve
got a bit of Abo in you as well. No offence or anything.”

“I’m a Chilean,” Muller said, for what seemed like the
thousandth time since arriving in Perth. “Many of my
countrymen have German surnames. As for my ances¬
try, I’m Mestizo, half-Indian.”

If any of that impressed Rawlinson he didn’t show it.
“Got road trains in Chile?”

They walked out into the warm dusk air. “Not road
trains,” Muller said. “But heavy trucks work the Pan
American Highway. And diesel locomotives on the rail-

interione

way, hauling iron-ore and nitrates to Santiago. I have
worked on many sorts of vehicle, Rawlinson; many
kinds of diesel, gas-turbine and electric engine, as well
as hydraulics, drag-lines, container derricks, tower
cranes and robot clipper ships.”

“I didn’t ask for your bloody curriculum vitae. What
matters is if you can stick it out here working for Cad-
man.”

“The office in Perth seemed to think so.”

They were approaching a twin-prop, basking under
the strip’s floods, navigation lights pulsing.

“They also tell you we use trannies?”

“Trannies?”

Rawlinson popped a hatch on the side of the plane
and slung his kit into the hold. “Transients, mate. Cad-
man owns ’em, see? Well, not Cadman, exactly, but the
slant conglomerate which owns Cadman. Worked with
transients before, haven’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“In Chile transients are uncommon, Rawlinson. We’re
still a very...” Muller hesitated, not wanting to make
either himself or his countrymen sound backward.
“Conservative country.”

February 1998

“C’mon, even the bloody Pope okayed them. I thought
you lot were all bead-fiddlers south of Panama.”

Muller didn’t feel like getting into this discussion, not
right now. Instead, he just threw his grip in after Rawl-
inson’s kit. “It’s not my job to deal with the transients,
anyway. In Valparaiso I took many courses in mechan¬
ics, but not in psychology.”

“That doesn’t matter. Out here a bloke just muddles
through until he gets the hang of it. Experience is what
counts, mate. Like this hat, see?”

Muller studied the dark thing on Rawlinson’s head.
“Nice as pie when I bought it,” said the man. “But too
stiff. So I left it out on the Birdsville and let a few trains
run over it. After that I liked it a lot better.”

They were aloft, just the two of them up front in the
twin-prop’s cabin. Rawlinson had slipped the despatch
docket into the dash and the plane had done the rest,
hauling itself airborne until it reached the point where
its wings canted forward for level flight. Thirty minutes
had passed, and now the moon was shining - illumi¬
nating endlessly parallel dunes which made it seem as
if the plane was only a moth, hovering above a corru¬
gated iron roof.

On the Oodnadatta

“Do Cadman’s cows eat sand?’ Muller asked.

“Of course they bloody don’t. You should see this
place after a good rainstorm. Overnight bloody wheat-
field.” Rawlinson stubbed out his cigarette. “Anyway,
stop gawking and call up the dossier. We’ll be landing
in a few minutes.”

Muller unlatched a battered sleevetop and paged it
open, scrolling until he found the file which held doc¬
umentation on Cadman’s fleet.

“Here’s the rego,” Rawlinson said, handing him the
despatch docket. Muller noted the number and scrolled
down the dossier list, until he found the match. “Mack,
is it?”

“Mitsubishi. Gas-turbine.”

“All we need. Bloody Jap rigs can’t take the dust, see.”

The despatch had been alerted when the train hadn’t
checked in at the Anna Creek station, on its way south
with a full load of Cadman cattle. The train’s navsat
beacon put it 30 kilometres below Oodnadatta, but
there was nothing about why it had broken down.

“Let’s just hope it’s a broken blade,” Rawlinson said.
“’Cause the last thing I feel like doing is arguing with
a tranny.”

‘You argue with them?”

“Sweet talk ’em mate. Persuade them to get on with
the job.” Muller felt the plane nose down, like there was
suddenly too much wax in his ears. “’Course, sometimes
I can’t be bothered, or they just don’t get the message.
That’s why we always carry a few spares in the back of
the plane.”

“Spares?”

“Trannies, mate.” Rawlinson chuckled. “Don’t worry,
you’ll get used to it.”

Muller thought he could see the broken-down train
some way ahead, perched on the edge of the Oodna¬
datta road, etched across the corrugated iron like a slug
track. A red light on the instrument panel started flash¬
ing, synched with a piercing electronic tone. Muller had
no more than a second to worry about it before Rawl¬
inson leant over and flicked a switch, turning the light
amber and silencing the noise.

“Nothing to worry about, Paco,” he said. “Just the
train saying hello.”

“Hello?”

“Checking us over.” Rawlinson excavated something
from his nose, scrutinized it, then secreted it under the
panel. “Cadman doesn’t advertise it, but some of the
trains’ll defend themselves if they feel threatened.”

“Who’d attack a train?”

“Sons of Namatjira for one.”

Muller nodded. “I read about the Sons in Perth. They
have a complaint against Cadman?”

“They say his land overruns sacred ground; that it
pisses off the local spirits.”

Muller was silent for a moment. “Many of my coun¬
trymen would not dismiss such a claim, Mr Rawlinson.
Do you believe in spirits?”

‘Yeah, I believe in spirits. You go into any Abo set¬
tlement and you’ll see spirits, Paco.” Rawlinson drew in
breath. “Trouble is they’re mainly of the methylated
variety.”

The poodle on Sapphire’s lap was a glob of pink cotton-
candy with eyes and a ribbon.

“Mummy s going away,” she said. “For a long time.
But you’re to be very brave.”

She’d chosen to chill out; during what the LA MetNet’s
smartware called - within accepted error norms - the
last optimal day of October 2008. If all went well, she
would be revived on a similarly optimal day two or three
decades down the line. By then, the Nanotopia would
have arrived, and every day would be as near optimal
as anyone cared. At least that was what she had read.

“I’ve called them,” Anton said, emerging from the
darkness of the house onto the bright patio. He had been
swimming before she asked him to phone the company.
Now a black gown hung from his broad shoulders, bare
feet leaving sickle-shaped prints on the patio, hair fur¬
rowed back from his brow in brilliant grooves. His
shades were of a new form-adapting style that faintly
disturbed Sapphire, resembling a slab of obsidian
inserted in a convenient slot in his face.

“The Ultralife team will be here in a few minutes,” he
said.

‘You’ve alerted perimeter security ?”

“Absolutely. Wouldn’t do to shoot down their heli¬
copter, would it.”

Fifteen years in LA hadn’t dented Anton’s English
accent, still as hard and rectilinear as his sunglasses.
Helicopter, he said - never chopper, or anything so
crassly imprecise.

“Those Stingers were a good buy,” she said. “Shame
I never got to see them used in anger. But Mark was
right. They did their job just by being there.” She glared
into his shades. “Congratulations. You’ve got superb
taste in boyfriends.”

Anton smiled. “Actually I spoke to Mark yesterday
concerning some rather nasty little surface-to-air jobs
the Arabs have got their hands on. Those Stingers are
getting rather long in the tooth.”

“Out of date?”

“Mmm. Even the Arizona Buddhist Militia have them
now. I think we should consider upgrading to Patriot II’s.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want the Arizona Buddhist Mili¬
tia showing us up, would we.” She took a sip on her car¬
rot juice. “Whoever the fuck they are.”

You always were ahead of the vogue, Sapphire. Defin¬
ing it, even. Shame to give all that up now.”

“Listen, pardon the anachronism, but didn’t I make
it clear you have a blank cheque as far as maintaining
the estate goes? I don’t give a rat’s hiney about the deals
you and Mark cook up, as long as this place is still here
in 30 years time.” She nodded beyond the veranda. “And
I don’t want anyone developing those hills before I wake.
I don’t care who owns them now. You’ve got 30 years to
buy them out, whoever they are. When they revive me I
want to wake on this exact fucking patio, and I want the
same fucking view, understand?”

“Perfectly.”

Yeah, well maybe you don’t. Read this.” Sapphire
tossed Anton one of the U-life brochures. “See what they
say? There’s no reason why deanimation and revival
shouldn’t be just like taking a little catnap.” She
watched as the black facet of his glasses tracked over the
glossy, like one of the security cams stationed around the
perimeter. You don’t even dream. It’s just like a slow dis¬
solve. You know what a slow dissolve is, Anton? Like in
the vid for... ” Sapphire trailed off. She hadn’t made a

interione

Alastair Reynolds

promo since Anton was wetting beds, but sometimes she
forgot.

“Deanimation,” he said, amusedly. “Calling it that
makes it seem about as commonplace as colonic irri¬
gation.”

“About which you undoubtedly know more than me,
honey. But why should they call it anything else? They
don’t have to, not since ’99.”

That, of course, was when everything had changed.
Californian law had been amended then, making it
legally unnecessary for anyone to be dead before they
were prepared for chill-out. That legal wrinkle removed
the need to even mention the “d” word in any of Ultra¬
life’s publicity material. In 1999 over a thousand dean¬
imations took place; enough business to keep 20
corporate clones of U-life above water. By 2003 - with
thousands of the State’s richest and middle-richest tak¬
ing that route yearly - the LA Times even started a sep¬
arate cryobituaries section. But Sapphire hadn’t waited
until that stampede; she’d signed up four years before
- one of the first 10,000 to do so. Now it was nothing
even remotely adventurous. Politicians were doing it.
Even a few cosmetic surgeons she could name, and some
actors who hadn’t managed an unaired pilot since the
80s. Last month there’d been that lounge-bar pianist
with the joke recording contract, his tacky farewell bash
on the roof of the U-life building. She’d stolen the whole
show, her first public appearance in two years; left the
pianist sap crying into his pina colada and wondering
if he’d crashed the wrong party. Fact was, if Sapphire
wasn’t already locked into it, she doubted she’d even con¬
sider deanimation now. Too damn unoriginal by far.

But, like they said, too late to stop now.

She angled her shades down on her nose and waited
until she could hear the suppressed thump of the arriv¬
ing U-life chopper, scudding safely over the de-armed
Stinger missile cordon, over the stepped lawns and the
bougainvillaea.

Muller watched things scurry away from the plane’s
enlarging shadow, strobe-frozen in the red and green
ellipses cast by the lights. There was a dead marsupial
by the strip, a reptile feasting in its midst. A goanna,
they called them. Muller had seen enough at the road¬
house. They weren’t dangerous, but they hissed like
devils, and could run surprisingly well. He wondered
how they tasted - and, judging by the cuisine back at
the roadhouse, wondered if he already knew.

“Bring the sleeve,” Rawlinson said, once they were
down. “Plug it into the rig, see if you can find out why
she’s stopped. And don’t mind the fats - they always get
noisy if the trains stop. They think it’s the sheds.”

Muller nodded and hopped out, using his torch to find
his way along the road train’s side. There were three
trailers hitched behind the Mitsubishi tug, each trailer
a slatted box crammed with snorting Cadman stock.
Muller did not want to put his face too close to the slats.
He could sense the pressure of the animals without see¬
ing them, as if all the cows in each trailer had con¬
gealed into a single swelling mass of dough behind the
slats. Near the end of the trailer, the side-gate rattled,
straining against chains and padlocks with each hoof
kick. Muller knelt down each time he passed one of the
couplings, angling the torch under the chassis.

February 1998

On the Oodnadatta

“Power-link’s ruptured here, Rawlinson,” he said,
raising his voice above the cattle. “Would that make the
last trailer’s brakes come on?”

“Nah. We strip out the failsafes before they ever leave
the depot.” Rawlinson lit a cigarette. “If we didn’t, we’d
have ’em shutting down on us every hundred yards.”

Muller weighed his words carefully. “That doesn’t
sound especially safe, Rawlinson. If the rig had to stop
suddenly, the whole string could jack-knife.”

He was thinking of a legendary jack-knife on the Pan
American, where the road snaked its way through the
Atacama foothills. A tanker had braked too hard to
avoid a boulder which had come down in the middle of
the road. With defective brakes on the trailer, the whole
unit had dog-legged through 90 degrees, projecting the
rear half of the tanker over the edge of the road. The
tanker’s contents had sluiced backwards, until the
weight dragged the whole truck over the edge. That was
in 2011, back when most of the lines still used drivers.
There’d been a shrine by the road ever since, a
patiently-tended plaster house with plastic flowers.

“So what?” Rawlinson said. “They’re only fats, and
there’s nobody up front to worry about.” He gave Muller
a boisterous slap between the shoulder blades. “Now go
plug that box in up front.”

The rig sat on a six-wheeled chassis, wedge-shaped
prow ribbed with bent roo-bars. There were no win¬
dows, only a bulbous black projection on the roof which
contained the road train’s sensor systems and navsat
gear, sticking forward like a dinosaur horn. Amber
cherry lights turned silently above the prow. It looked
mean, and the wheeze of the idling turb sounded like
a prolonged bestial exhalation.

Muller flipped open the sleevetop port, spooled out
the optical cabling and hooked in. A few moments later
the road train’s ID and diagnostics dribbled across the
screen. The numbers were difficult to interpret, so
Muller made the sleeve graph up a holo of the engine
- lasered onto his eyes, so that the turb seemed to hover
above his sleeve. He clipped the torch onto his belt,
using his free hand to remove parts of the engine holo
until the blades were visible. Monocrystal jobs, accord¬
ing to the spec, so it was highly unlikely one had shat¬
tered. But who knew what the dust out here was
capable of, or what corners Cadman had cut.

But the blades were clean, not even running hot.

Muller checked the rest, but he’d known the turbine
was sweet almost from the moment he’d heard it. The
only reason it was running slow was because the driver
had pulled over. Except, as he reminded himself, there
was no driver. Only software - and even that wasn’t
really the case.

Rawlinson was kicking the tyres when Muller caught
up with him on the other side of the train. “Nothing
crook, is there.”

“The rig’s fine, Rawlinson. Mechanically, at least. I
suppose that isn’t what you wanted to hear.”

Rawlinson’s moonlit form shrugged. “When these
mongrels blow a gasket they generally squirt a sick-
note up to the navsat. This time there wasn’t one.”

Muller nodded, having the uncomfortable feeling
Rawlinson had been testing his competency. “We should
get her moving again, I think. Those cows don’t sound
very happy. You Australians like your beef more than

Argentinians.”

“Beef?” Rawlinson made an odd spluttering noise,
and Muller watched the orange firefly of his cigarette
arc groundwards. “You’d be lucky to squeeze a stock
cube out of that lot.”

For a moment Muller wondered if his English had
failed him - or at least failed Rawlinson. “Are you say¬
ing Cadman’s cows aren’t for beef?”

“Not this consignment, Paco.” Rawlinson knuckled
the slats, seemingly oblivious to the overpowering
bovine stench which erupted between them. “Comes
down about twice a week. Looks like all the others,
except the serial number on the docket’s different - and
they always plane us out to fix one of these first, even
if there’s a regular consignment going green somewhere
else.”

“Then all the other trains carry Muller hesitated,
knowing that what he was about to say would sound
ridiculous. “Beef cows?”

“Yeah.”

Muller hesitated on the threshold of his next ques¬
tion, again wondering if Rawlinson was testing him.
“Then what are these cows for, if they aren’t for eating?”

“They’re pregnant.”

“Ready to calf?”

Muller caught Rawlinson’s amused squint. “Yeah,
Paco. Ready to calf. Which is why we have to get this
Jap shit moving again. Wouldn’t want ’em popping
before Adelaide, would we.”

Muller heard the side-gate rattle again, amazed it
had lasted until now without breaking. ‘You think the
problem’s with the transient, don’t you.”

‘You get a nose for these things,” Rawlinson said,
implying it was a skill Muller would likely never
acquire. “You got the dossier handy? Call up the doco.”

He meant the biography of the transient currently
driving - or not, as it happened — the Cadman road
train. Muller worked the sleevetop and found it in a few
seconds. “What do you want to know?”

“Who we’re dealing with would be a start.”

He meant the transient’s name. “Blaine Dubois,”
Muller said, nodding. “Do you know this one?”

“Sure I do. Put him in myself.” Rawlinson levered up
his hat and scratched at the wire wool beneath. “Went
under in about 2008, right?”

“You have a good memory, Rawlinson.”

‘You don’t forget a name like that in a hurry. Piano
player or something. Shirt lifter, probably. Must have
made a bob or too as well. Anyway, most of Cadman’s
trannies come from ’08. There were more in that year
than in the five before. ’Course, there were hardly any
from ’09.”

“The Big One,” Muller said wistfully. “I remember
hearing about it as a child, when I came home from
school in Mendoza.”

“They teach you to read at your school?”

Muller frowned. “Of course.”

“Then hit that fucking scroll button. Don’t want to
stand around here all night.”

One thing about U-life; they didn’t piss around.

Sapphire watched their chopper execute a faultless
landing on the asphalt; crew drop and immediate dust-
off, as if the pilot had logged hours inserting infiltration

squads into Central American rainforest. Which, she
supposed, was quite probable. And wouldn’t that be a
pisser: it was only 20 years since she’d recorded a par¬
ticularly sanctimonious track for that album protesting
against US involvement in Nicaragua; the one with the
overproduced singalong finale. Right now the chopper
was bottle-green, with a big Egyptian eye painted on one
side, camouflaged as the traffic-monitoring chopper of
a fictitious LA television station. But Sapphire knew
from the brochure that if she wished, the pilot could
throw a switch in his cockpit and the chopper’s smart
paint-pixels would immediately flick over into the U-life
corporate colours. Depended on exactly how much pub¬
licity she wanted.

None, was the short answer.

Maybe if all this was a year or two ago... or if her
dickbrained hippie parents were still around and she
could still aggravate them in public, or if her career
wasn’t stalled in some kind of terminal power-dive...

The team-leader was flattening his hair back down,
ruffled by the downdraught from the chopper. He was
the only one wearing a suit; a vile electric pink she
wouldn’t have inflicted on a poodle. His chin jutted,
making it seem as if he was constantly clenching his
teeth. Four green-coated cryomedics came behind, one
pair lugging a gurney, the other two weighed down with
chunky plastic boxes, sprouting dayglo plastic pipes and
digital readouts, emblazoned with medical decals. They
looked like kid’s toys made fractionally too large. Anton
was down there to meet them, ushering them in out of
the sun, into the house’s hangarlike coolness. A few
moments later she heard them pattering up the stairs.

By now the U-life chopper was loitering over the San
Bernadino freeway, just one more hovering speck of grit
in the chocolate caul of late afternoon smog.

“I’m Leitner,” said the suit. “Pleasure to finally meet
you, Sapphire.”

She winced. The drawback with only having one
name - great for product placement, but there was no
way anyone could address you without sounding like
you’d been intimate for years. Not unless they were
exceptionally skilled in nuance, the way they said the
Chinese could make one word mean 18 different things

“Sure, honey, and I bet you’ve got all my albums. Can
we get this shit over with?” She tilted down her sun¬
glasses. “And haven’t I seen you somewhere before,
recently?”

The guy took that as some kind of compliment, prob¬
ably. Best not to let the poor sap know it was his chinny-
chin-chin which she remembered.

“I was at the Dubois party,” Leitner said. “We handled
his departure arrangements as well.”

“You supposed to disclose that kind of thing?”

“What’s to disclose? Mr Dubois made no special pro¬
visions.”

“Guess he didn’t. Probably took the cheapest deal you
had on offer, right? The budget special.” She made a
chopping motion across her throat. “Head only. Or what
is it you guys call it? Neural consolidation?” Sapphire’s
laughter raced away toward the hills. “Great. Kills me
every time. What do you call someone with no body? Cor¬
poreally challenged?”

“We don’t do neurals,” Leitner said, not hiding his dis¬
taste. “They weren’t good for business; at least not the

_ Alastair Reynolds

kind of business we like.” Then he nodded to his four
assistants, the guys with the gurney and the Fischer-
Price doctor’s kits. “Maybe we should get to work.”

Muller glanced over the remainder of the tranny’s
sparse biographical data while Rawlinson played a cat¬
tle prod through the slats of the rear trailer, making the
fats jump around and snort even more than usual. Like
the man said, Dubois had gone into cryogenic preser¬
vation in 2008, a year before the Big One hit Southern
California. The company which had frozen him, Ultra¬
life, had gone to great lengths to insulate their clients.
Their cryogenic vaults had been mounted on electro¬
magnetic shock-absorbing bearings to smother the
worst effects of any quake, and each had carried its own
six month backup radioisotope generator, capable of
supplying juice to the refrigeration unit even if the rest
of LA went back to the Flintstones. Which, indeed, had
almost been the case. The quake had been bad enough
in its own right, but then the Chernorange meltdown
had happened.

Still, there was too much real estate there to go beg¬
ging. In the end it had been the Greater Singaporeans
who cleaned up most of the mess, and the Greater Sin¬
gaporeans who eventually unearthed the Ultralife cryo¬
genic vaults. Lacking either the rights of the living or
the sanctity of the dead, the legal status of the frozen
had been murky to say the least. While best legal
expert systems money could buy were locking antlers
in cyberspace, the Singaporeans quietly spirited the
frozen out of the country.

A year later everyone had forgotten about them. But
they hadn’t been lost. They were waiting in a vault a
mile beneath Singapore, until technology and - by
necessity - economics, progressed to the point where
they could be revived.

In the end, technology got there first. And by then,
Greater Singapore happened to own most of Australia.

For a long time Sapphire experienced nothing.

There was no sensation, no low-level consciousness,
not even dreams. But somehow - when the nothingness
ended - Sapphire felt as if she had come through some¬
thing which had lasted for a longer period of time than
she could easily name. It was like slipping a cassette into
a VCR, and waiting through an eternity of static before
the copyright notice scrolled up, except there was a com¬
plete absence of cheesy music.

The first thing she experienced - and for several years
the only thing - was the time. Rendered in big red let¬
ters, like the digital face of an old bedside alarm. It
appeared to be the only thing in her universe; floating
less in blackness than in a limbo of nonexistence. She
could neither ignore nor look away from the clock, and
she found it virtually impossible to imagine anything
lying beyond the clock, or around it. Sapphire wasn’t
stupid, so it didn’t take her too long to figure out that the
clock was being projected into her brain; all extraneous
data carefully filtered from her sensorium.

For some time she was aware of the clock, without
actually registering what it told her. But gradually - it
was impossible to guess after how long - Sapphire took
notice of what the clock was saying. It ought to have
been shocking, except in her present state Sapphire was

February 1998

On the Oodnadatta _

really not capable of being shocked. What she experi- they were overwhelmed by the bovine tsunami push-

enced was more a feeling of mild perturbation. ing behind them. They simply fell out, and disappeared

She’d gone under in 2008. Now - according to the under the blurred hoofs of the other cows. Above the

clock - it was 2024. And she’d barely had time to deal echoing thunder, Muller heard a cacophony of snorting

with the unreality of that before the final digit in the and — faintly — something else. The something else was

year incremented by one, and it was 2025. A little while a sound he had not expected from animals like this: a

later, 2026. The months were slamming past, and the kind of squealing or crying. If he had not known oth-

pair of digits which counted the days of each month erwise it might have struck him as human.

were locked in a perpetual blur. It looked corny, like the Rawlinson had gotten himself out of the way just in
old movie cliche of the fluttering calendar pages or the time, and was now making a futile attempt to stem the

rushing train wheels. flood with the cattle prod, an activity whose sole out-

Except this was real, or at least she assumed so. come seemed to be that of making the escaped animals

But it hadn’t been in the contract, not as far as she even more furious and panicked than before.

remembered. According to Ultralife’s publicity material, Muller glanced at his watch. Now, he thought, was as
Sapphire was not meant to experience anything at all good as time as any to do what he had come to do, and

during her chill-out. Maybe a few odd sensations dur- the cows would provide an excellent diversion.

ing the immediate pre-revival period (they were just cov- He reached into his jacket pocket, removed a hand-

ering their backs on that one, as no one had actually phone and punched numbers.
developed the technology) but nothing like this.

It was 2028 now. But dammit if something hadn’t The television showed some kind of logo for a moment,

changed. The blurring day-digits were still changing but not one Sapphire recognized. Then she was looking

illegibly fast, but the months did not seem to be chang- at a suit, looking at her from behind a desk, hands

ing quite as rapidly. More than that, the gap between the clasped solemnly before him. The guy was in his 60s, but

years seemed to be lengthening, slowly but surely. Sap- pretty well-preserved; good tan. Did she know him from

phire watched - not so much fascinated as totally com- somewhere? The general air of paternalistic over-sin-

pelled - as the year became 2029, and then - slowing cerity he exuded reminded Sapphire of a presidential

perceptibly now-2030. By 2031 the rate of slow-down address. Maybe the guy was about to tell her they’d

was steepening. She could make out individual days nuked some towel-heads.

now, and she felt a perverse stab of loss as her birthday “Sapphire,” he said. “My name is Mr Leitner - you

whipped past, uncelebrated. remember me, don’t you? I was there when we put you

By 2032 time was positively crawling. By late May the under, back in ’08.”
days were changing at a subjective rate of only one every “Yeah, I remember you.” She was only mildly sur-

ten or so seconds (whatever that meant), and the rate prised that speaking came easily. Every other detail

seemed to have stabilized. In early June the clock seemed to have been taken care of, so it would have been

changed, gaining detail which had not been present odd if they’d skimped on something so basic. “Since

before. No longer just a sequence of hovering red numer- when did you get the chin straightened out?”

als, it had gained a body, encased in wood-effect plas- “A long time ago, Sapphire.” He smiled, almost as an
tic, with little fold-down legs. A perfectly realized digital exercise in demonstrating the remodelled skeletal struc-

alarm-clock, floating in limbo. In mid June the clock ture of his jaw. “And I’d love to talk about old times, but

receded, until the face was only a quarter of its previous I’m afraid there’s something of a... ” Leitner deliberated,

size. Smoothly a whole room bloomed into existence “Shall we call it a crisis, or is that too strong?”

around it. The clock lay on a bedside table, next to a vase “Better tell me what it is first. Am I still frozen, or
of flowers. Autumnal sunlight slanted through the what?”

room’s one window, teased and filtered by trees moving “Definitely,”Leitner said. “But it isn’t as simple as that,

in a soft breeze. There’ve been a few changes since you went under -

It looked like a private room in a hospital; comfortable things that weren’t foreseen in any of the scenarios.”

but not exactly opulent. Vaguely out-of-date as well. There “So lay it on me.”

was a television at the foot of the bed, on a grey metal can- “Not enough time to go into any real detail.” The guy

tilever. The whole obsolete unit was surrounded by the nodded out of the television, toward the alarm clock,

same wood-effect plastic as the alarm clock. “What’s happening, Sapphire, is that we’re running a

The television came on. model of your brain in a supercomputer.”

“Running a model?”

“Shit,” said Rawlinson. “Simulating your brain. We took your frozen head and

Muller heard the metal bolts snap like a series of rifle scanned it with some fancy new equipment; stuff that

shots, almost too close together to separate in his head. can map where all your brain cells are and how they’re

Then there was a squeal of tortured metal as the train’s wired up to each other. Then we took all that informa-

slatted side gave way, folding down against the pressure tion and fed it into the computer, and the computer

of the fats behind it like a collapsing dam wall. What fol- allowed the model to evolve forward in time.”

lowed was a tidal surge of half-tonne animals; cows “And?”

pouring from the innards in a single brown torrent. It “There is no ‘and’, Sapphire. You’re it. You’re the

was only then that Muller understood how densely model, right now.” Leitner smiled. Behind him, a cor-
those cows had been packed into the train. The force porate picture window framed big skyscrapers crowd-
was released with such suddenness that the first three ing into the distance; architecture soft and melted like
or four animals did not have time to jump down before warming ice sculptures. “We got you scanned back in

12 interxone

2020,” he said. “But until recently the computer power
was so slow that it took months to progress you by just
a few subjective seconds. Eventually we had enough
spare capacity to start feeding some sensory stimulus
into the model, but it was still godawful slow. But things
hotted up in the late 20s. By 2032 we’d ported you to one
of the new quantum liquid-architecture systems, which
meant we could begin to simulate you at a rate only a
few hundred times slower than realtime; peanuts in
computational terms. By June, we’d gained enough
spare capacity to simulate a full environment.”

Sapphire had taken all that in, but it hadn’t quite per¬
colated down to understanding. “Let me get this
straight,” she said. “What I’m feeling now - what I’m
thinking now - is all going on in some fucking computer
somewhere?”

“Jakarta, actually.”

Sapphire sniffed. “The least you could have done is
simulate me somewhere I haven’t been before. I’m
amazed I don’t feel more pissed about it. 1 threw tele¬
visions out of hotel rooms for less than that.”

“Emotional responses aren’t well modelled by the sys¬
tem,” Leitner said. “Too much messy biochem. We’re
working on it, but it’s all a bit wire-frame at this stage.
Think of emotion as being the texture of your modelled
mindstate. Our simulation resembles early virtual real¬
ity in that respect - very plasticky.”

“Like your hair, Leitner. And what about my frozen
head anyway -1 hope to god it’s still intact, or I’m going
to sue your asses for every fucking... whatever it is you
spend in Jakarta.”

“Your frozen body is...” Leitner paused, scrutinized his
interlocked fingers. “Currently intact. But I’m afraid
that’s why I’m talking to you now. The situation isn’t
optimal.”

“What situation?”

“The legal status of your body. After the big one, Ultra¬
life ceased to exist in the sense that you knew it. Your
frozen body, and those of our other clients, were corpo¬
rate assets. After a number of corporate transactions -
all very complicated - the frozen had become someone
else’s property.”

“You’re losing me there. What the hell was the big
one?” Sapphire hesitated a moment. “No, don’t bother.
1 can guess.”

Leitner put up a hand. ‘You can catch up on the
details later - there’ll be plenty of time for that. First we
have to clear a small technical matter.”

Rawlinson showed Muller the hatch in the side of the
road train’s rig where the transient modules were
inserted. After the dust cover had slid back, they had
to enter a ten-digit authorization into a keypad, then
undergo a retinal laser-scan. Then the inner door
whirred aside, exposing the module, which was not
much larger than a stack of cards; a blue LED pulsing
in its end.

“That’s our boy,” Rawlinson said. “Doesn’t look like
much does it?”

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

“Oh, he’s in there. Just doesn’t want to work any more.”

Muller began to undo the sleevetop, ready to pass it
to the other man. “You said you’d try and persuade him.”

“I did, didn’t I.” Rawlinson still had the cattle-prod

Alastair Reynolds

Febmary 1998

On the Oodnadatta

in his hand, and Muller got the impression the man
would much rather return to the task of agitating the
animals. But with a long-winded sigh he entered a few
more digits into the keypad, causing a little screen to
light up next to the module.

They were looking down on a man.

The man was curled up foetally, in the driving seat
of a rig; hard Australian sun blasting in through the
windows.

“Hey, Blaine,” Rawlinson said. “What do you think
you’re playing at, stopping this consignment?”

For a long time there was no response from the man
in the screen. Then - slowly - he uncurled himself and
looked at them, his face pitiful in the harsh glare. “I
can’t go on,” he said. “I can’t go on, Mr Rawlinson. I
can’t do this any more.”

“This isn’t any old load of cows, you know.”

“I know what the load is, Mr Rawlinson. That doesn’t
change anything. I just can’t do it any more.”

“There’s a word for that, Blaine. Forfeiture. You know
what that means, don’t you.”

“Perfectly.” The man’s voice was utterly drained of
emotion. “I renege on the contract to pay for my recor¬
poreality. And since I’m not currently over-burdened
with human rights, you may legally erase me.”

Rawlinson nodded appreciatively. “That’s about the
size of it. At this point I’m s’posed to remind you of just
what’s at stake... but frankly I get the impression I’d
be wasting your time and mine.” Then he turned to
Muller. “Tell you what, Paco. Get some practise in. See
if you can’t talk this old girl into finishing the job. But
don’t raise your hopes.”

When Rawlinson was out of earshot Blaine Dubois
said: “I’m safe, aren’t I? You promised me I’d be taken
care of.”

‘You’re safe - no one’s going to erase you.” Muller
reached up with one hand, ready to eject the module,
but then hesitated. “You could still finish the job, you
know. It depends on how badly you want to five again.”

For the first time the transient laughed. “Not this
badly,” he said.

“Go on,” Sapphire said, thinking that Leitner sounded
like one of her old accountants from the 90s, before the
software replacements came on the market.

“The firm that now oversees your cryogenically frozen
body does things differently than Ultralife. And as your
legal ties with the new provider are...” Leitner bit his
lower lip. “Unclear... they’re at liberty to cut certain
basic provisions from the terms of contract.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning they want to save money by going for full
neural consolidation. Are you following me Sapphire ?”
The slick bastard staring at her out the television, like
he was proposing nothing more innocuous than a mod¬
erate adjustment of her royalties scale.

‘Yeah,” she said. “I’m following you. You’re saying they
want to cut my head off, right?”

“Per unit cost, its cheaper than full-body jobs. Of
course, that wasn’t Ultralife’s way of doing things - but
we’re under new management these days.”

Yeah,” she said. “And isn’t it always the same old
same old.”

“If there were any other way... ”

“Well, obviously there isn’t, so why don’t you just get
the thing over with? Shit, I don’t know why you even
bothered consulting me. Like I’m gonna refuse, right?”

“It’s called courtesy,” Leitner said.

So, of course, they did it - and Sapphire felt nothing,
because she was no longer in her head. They even let her
watch the procedure on a visual feed into her computer-
simulated mind. It was unpleasant, but not because of
what they did - rather because of what had become of
her body since she went under. It didn’t look right; all
bruised and shrivelled and ruptured, like one of those
guys they occasionally dug up in Siberia; like she’d been
encased in a glacier for a few thousand years. She
understood that every cell in her body had been ruined
by expanding ice crystals, and that, while the requisite
nanotechnology existed to repair each of them, it was far
too expensive and laborious to actually do.

Later, when the company said it was going to have to
destroy her head as well, she felt nothing but the sense
of relief one might get from clearing out an attic of famil¬
ial junk.

But that wasn’t the end of it, not at all.

“Help me with these bloody cows, you mongrel,” Rawl¬
inson was saying, his voice cutting above the bellowing
and the still-present squealing like a badly-oiled chain¬
saw. “We’ve lost a few, but if we can get some of the oth¬
ers back aboard we might be looking at a bonus.”

Muller sauntered toward the train’s rear. “I had to
erase the transient,” he said, patting the bulge in his
shirt pocket. “You were right about him.”

“Didn’t have the balls for the job,” Rawlinson said.
“Funny thing is, fewer of ’em do these days. They say
it’s the speed of the new architectures. Makes a little
job go a long, long way. Did you get the replacement
tranny from the plane?”

“I thought I’d let you show me the installation pro¬
cedure.”

“Nothing to it. Just slot ’em in and give the intro¬
ductory pep-talk. They already know the basics by the
time we get ’em.” But then the man trailed off, and his
gaze was sweeping the horizon off to one side of the
Oodnadatta trail. “What the hell are those lights?”

“Vehicles, I suspect,” Muller said, but so quietly that
Rawlinson didn’t hear him.

In any case he didn’t have long to wait. For a moment
the cars were just indistinct dark shapes somewhere
beyond the closest fringe of mulga trees, and then they
erupted forward, engines surging, mercury lights scy¬
thing the air, casting bright ellipses along the slatted
side of the train.

“It’s them,” Rawlinson said.

“Them?” Muller said, feigning ignorance.

“Sons of bloody Namatjira. I told you they’ve been
raiding Cadman’s trucks.” Rawlinson threw down the
cattle prod, seemingly giving up on the task of round¬
ing up the remaining loose animals. It would have been
futile in any case: most of the cows which were capable
of moving had bolted in terror into the night at the first
sign of the cars, and the others were either dead or
dying; those which had been crushed in the first stam¬
pede; dark shapes around the broken trailer like so
many beached whales. But, thought Muller, did beached
whales squeal like that? Did beached whales cry? Rawl-

Alastair Reynolds

inson had said the cows were ready to calf... but could
even calves explain that awful threnody?

He didn’t have time to worry about it. The vehicles
belonging to the Sons of Namatjira had formed a cir¬
cular corral around the road train, prowling in low gear.
Most of the cars were pick-ups; four by fours prognate
with roo-bars.

Rawlinson had reached the plane. He opened the side
hatch and reached deep into it, emerging with something
that Muller at first took for a crowbar. But it wasn’t.

Rawlinson hefted the rifle, slipped a round into the
chamber and fired it into the sky.

“I’m not sure that’s legal,” Muller said, while the cir¬
cling vehicles slowed to a halt.

“So sue me, Paco.”

“In any case, I’m not sure the Sons are greatly
impressed.”

He was right. Things were moving now, although the
combination of gloom and glare made it hard to tell pre¬
cisely what. Figures, certainly - dressed in fatigues and
balaclavas. Muller caught the occasional glint of pale
flesh. Although the Sons were nominally an Aboriginal
terrorist group, he’d heard that they’d recruited numer¬
ous specialists and observers from other paramilitary
organizations around the world, and in the melange of
voices which carried across the night he heard accents
of German, Israeli, Dutch...

But the Sons came no closer, and they were too far
away for Rawlinson’s elephant stopper. Instead, darker,
sleeker shapes emerged from the corral, loping across
the ground, or, Muller realized, not so much loping as
bounding, springing. He knew what these animals were.
It was what he had seen the goanna feasting on when
the plane landed. Marsupials. Kangaroos, specifically.

Or what once had been kangaroos.

Each of the hapless animals had been converted by
the Sons’ rogue bio-engineers into cybernetically-
enhanced terrorist devices. Muller had heard about
these creatures in Perth; how they were called man-
garoos because the rogue bio-engineers tended to be
nervy Japanese kids who’d read too many comic books.
It was, of course, an awful long way from the simple
nervous system of a roach to the intricate, messy mind
of a marsupial...but then again, the bio-engineers
hadn’t had to worry about funding or ethics committees.
It was garden-shed cybernetics.

Each mangaroo wore night-vision goggles, its limbs
and chest cased in sheets of articulated kevlar. Fibre-
optic cables erupted from the back of each mangaroo’s
head and vanished into a matt-black control backpack.
Most of the animals carried a specially-modified
machine-pistol, buckled around one forelimb. The other
arm - or in some cases both arms - ended in curved
carbon-steel scythes. Some of the mangaroos even had
missiles or the long gunmetal tubes of grenade-throw¬
ers projecting over their backpacks.

And they were bouncing closer.

“You want the good news or the bad news?” said Leitner.
“Well, okay, let me tell you. The good news is we can get
you back into a body again. The bad news is, someone
has to pay for it.”

The conversation they were having was happening
much faster than realtime now. Computational speed

had increased to the point where Sapphire’s neural pro¬
cesses could be simulated more rapidly than those of a
flesh-and-blood brain. Did this mean that certain details
were being skimped? She didn’t know; no one was pre¬
pared to tell her, and after a while it had stopped being
of any great concern.. After all, wasn’t this what every¬
one actually wanted?

“Just so long as it isn’t the one you thawed already,”
Sapphire said. “And that goes for the head as well.
That’s one model I’m trading in.”

“You probably know about cloning,” Leitner said. “Bit
of a taboo subject these last few decades, even though the
basic principles of mammalian cloning were established
last century. But what with the recent upheavals...”

“You’re saying you can grow a new body from my old
cells, is that it?”

“Half the trick, yes - and probably the easiest half,
actually.” Leitner sounded convincing, but it was really
a simulation of Leitner, synchronized to match Sap¬
phire’s computational rate. “What’s harder is putting you
back in - your neural patterns. Very tricky procedure -
and very expensive too. Only slightly less costly than
rebuilding your old body cell by cell.”

“So why not do it that way, if the expense isn’t so dif¬
ferent?”

“Because it wouldn’t be you, would it? Not unless we
found a way of putting back all the memories you’ve
accrued since we consolidated you. And if we’re going
to go to that trouble, we might as well begin with a
blank canvas.”

She could see the logic - almost. ‘You’re saying I’ve got
to wait until you’ve grown an adult body? Leitner, have
you any idea how slowly time passes here?”

“Actually,” he said, “that isn’t quite the problem you
think. We can grow an adult body in months now - pro¬
vided you’re willing to pay for it, of course.”

The mangaroos never used the worst of their weapons.
Even the rifles they used with discretion, peppering the
last of the trailers, the one which the fats had already
vacated. They put a few holes in the tug, but not
enough to do serious damage - and they were careful
not to get too close. Muller remembered what Rawlin¬
son had said about the road trains being able to defend
themselves. The defensive systems had been neutral¬
ized by the plane, and that was why the Sons had been
able to get as close as they had. But evidently - at the
back of their minds - was the fear that the defensive
systems would come back on-line, triggered by some
automatic cut-in they had never anticipated.

Of course, Rawlinson wasn’t saying much at all at the
moment. What he was doing was lying by the road side,
moaning and pawing at his thigh.

“I told you shooting at them wasn’t a good idea,” Muller
said, inspecting the wound. “Did you expect you could
take out enough of them before one of them got you?”

Rawlinson stopped moaning for a moment, like a radio
being tuned off-channel. “Who the hell are you, Paco?”

“Exactly who I said I am. A Chilean who arrived in
Perth.”

Muller paused, knelt down and picked up something
from the ground - something long and metallic. For a
moment he only held it, half aware out of the corner of
his eye of the nearing Sons, who were advancing behind

February 1998

On the Oodnadatta
their animal accomplices.

“You’re in with these bastards,” Rawlinson said.
“You’re in with the bloody Sons, aren’t you?”

“Not really,” Muller said, still holding the cattle prod.
“They contacted me in Perth, asked if I might assist
them in a modest way, and for that they’d find me a
good job on the west coast — something more suited to
my skills than working on these wrecks.”

Now another voice rang out, female, amplified.

“His involvement with us was really very limited, you
know. We wouldn’t want to overstate it.” And the Son
who was speaking paused to rip off her balaclava. She
was black, with high, regal cheekbones catching the
moonlight. Her accent, now that Muller paid proper
attention to it, was French, although it was very slight.
“Which isn’t to say that we aren’t grateful.”

‘You rigged this breakdown,” Rawlinson said.

“My, aren’t you quick. How else were we expected to
get close to one of your vehicles, unless you kindly dis¬
engaged the defence systems for us?”

Rawlinson said: “One more time, Paco - how much
did you know?”

“Less than you think,” the woman said. “We arranged
that Muller would arrive at the roadhouse not long
before the next special train was due to start for Ade¬
laide. When we arranged a breakdown, Muller was
guaranteed to be on the repair team.”

‘You arranged a breakdown?”

“One of our specialists hacked into your train and
had a chat with Mr Dubois,” the woman said.

“The tranny.”

Muller reached into his shirt pocket and tossed the
woman the module. “I promised him you wouldn’t erase
him.”

‘We won’t,” she said. “Though not being erased is the
best we can offer him.” Then she said: “Dubois was help¬
ful, of course. In his state of mind he was rather open to
suggestion. And he had a grudge of his own he wanted
settling, which we said we’d be able to help him with.”

This was news to Muller. “A grudge?”

“Concerning a woman called Sapphire. It was all
rather tawdry - and he wasn’t making a great deal of
sense - but it seems that this Sapphire woman rather
spoilt his exit from the living - upstaged his farewell
party, I believe. He’s been brooding on that ever since;
especially after he learnt she was in the same predica¬
ment as him.” The black woman shook her head, as if
none of this made any sense to her but she was only
relating it for everyone else’s benefit. “So we asked our
hacker to arrange for Sapphire to end up working the
same miserable contract as Mr Dubois. He didn’t have
the heart to suggest something worse, but neither could
he bear the thought of her getting off lightly.” Now she
smiled; the whiteness of her teeth sudden in the dark¬
ness. “So it’s all worked out splendidly. All that
remained then was for Muller to arrange a distraction
to mask our approach, and give us the word.”

“I didn’t even have to arrange one,” Muller said. ‘You
did that perfectly well yourself Rawlinson. Incidentally,
I think you’ll live - the bullet only grazed you - it looks
worse than it is. At least I think it does.”

“Up yours, Paco.”

The woman turned to one of the other Sons. “Get it
bandaged, then load this gentleman into the rear

trailer. He’ll get all the attention he needs when he
arrives in Adelaide — if he lasts that long, of course.”

Rawlinson seemed to take that as a cue to start moan¬
ing again, but it sounded false, like the tantrum of a
demonstrative child. Muller toyed with the cattle-prod
and, for a moment, considered touching the electrified
end against his partner. He had seen the effectiveness
of the prod against the escaped fats, and - while his
knowledge of bovine physiology was limited - he was
prepared to believe that cowskin was possibly less thin
than the organ enveloping Rawlinson. He wondered
what kind of squeal the man would emit; if in fact he
was able to emit any sound at all.

And then Muller remembered the other squealing;
the noise he had heard when the first few animals had
spilled from the trailer and been trampled by those fol¬
lowing them.

“What is that?” he said, addressing everyone present
simultaneously. “That noise, like crying?”

So they told her how it worked.

Economics, that was it. The one aspect of the world
which hadn’t changed at all. Nothing came for free, most
especially not the afterlife.

Cloning her body and growing it to adulthood wasn’t
going to be especially expensive, Leitner said. Only a few
years ago it would have been, because even when all the
genetic manipulation was done, you still had to pay
someone to be a surrogate mother, and the prices for that
had gone through the roof. Artificial wombs had been
tried with only moderate success; since it was incredi¬
bly hard to even approximate the biochemical envi¬
ronment of a living womb. The question of bringing
clones to term in other clones was an ethical minefield,
which really left only one option.

“My God,” said the black woman. ‘You don’t know what
any of this is about, do you?” There was no mockery in
her voice, only astonishment. ‘You actually don’t know
what this consignment is, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Muller said.

She turned to one of her sidekicks and had him walk
back to one of the pick-ups and return with two dark
shapes hanging from his hands. Muller saw what they
were as he came closer, into the pool of light around the
road train. He was carrying jerry-cans.

The woman took one of the cans for herself, then
passed the other to Muller. “I’ll show you, if you like.
But you won’t like it, I think.”

He hefted the jerry-can. “What’s this for?”

“You’ll see.”

The one remaining option, Leitner said, disturbed some
people. But look on the bright side. It was cheap. And that
meant the only large expense in the whole process was
wiring her neural patterns back into the clone’s brain.

“Now, obviously,” Leitner said. “Someone has to pay
for it. And the logical someone is the person who’s going
to benefit from it in the first place.”

Sapphire thought she was catching on fast now; get¬
ting the hang of the future. “Let me guess. You bring me
back to life and then it’s like, my ass is yours, until I pay
back the costs?”

“Well,” Leitner said. “You’ve got the gist of it right.

Just not the timing.”

And then he told her what they called people like her -
people who existed only as neural recordings running
on some computer somewhere; people who weren’t, by
any legal definition, actually people at all, although they
had the potential to become so at some point in the
future, if they wished. How they were called transients,
and how, around the world, at any one time, thousands
of transients were actually working, doing the jobs con¬
sidered too messy for cheap software and too shitty for
the living; slowly accruing the credits they needed to pay
off their future return to humanity....

Perhaps it was the stench of diesel that did it, or the red
stain on his fingers from the dyed liquid, which man¬
aged to look exactly like blood, or the smell he hoped
the stench of diesel would mask, but which still lingered
in the air. Perhaps it was all of these things, or perhaps
it was the look he had seen on Blaine Dubois’s face; the
look of a man whose soul had been slowly eviscerated.

Or perhaps it was what he had seen in the dirt, at
the rear of the road-train, where the last trailer had
broken open.

The black woman had never introduced herself as they
walked along the length of the train, but she had gone
some way toward preparing him for what they were
about to see. It was, she said, the real reason why they
had stopped this train. Not because of the land rights
- that was a lost cause now, and in any case it wasn’t
her fight. No; what they had stopped the train for was
the cattle. Because of what the cattle were carrying.

“Rawlinson said they were pregnant,” Muller said.
“He said that was why the train was carrying them to
Adelaide. But I didn’t understand the significance.”

“Cloning,” the woman said. “That’s Cadman’s part in
the big operation. Growing the bodies that the tran¬
sients need to return to, when they’ve paid their dues.”

And then she showed him what she meant, and
Muller finally placed the squealing noise had heard.
The noise that was so much like human crying. So
much so, in fact, there was very little else it could be.

The cows had been ready to calf, Rawlinson had said.
But not quite. And those that had died had ruptured;
splitting open to reveal burdens they had never been
meant to carry. Burdens which shifted and squirmed,
until the closest one, the one that was squealing the loud¬
est, turned its not-quite formed adult face toward Muller
and opened its pale eyes in a scream of apprehension.

The woman shot them with a tiny pistol Muller had
not noticed her carrying, and when the squealing was
over they unscrewed the jerry-cans and emptied them.

The deal was simple.

The Singaporean company that owned the biotech-
nical patents which would restore Sapphire to life had
many subsidiaries. One of these was a firm called Cad-
man who used transients to drive their road-trains. In
some way which Leitner didn’t go into, this operation
was integral to the whole process of bringing the tran¬
sients back to life - but that wasn’t important; she could
just as easily have ended up operating a sewer-inspec¬
tion drone or one of the machines which scraped bar¬
nacles off the bottom of oil-tankers. To pay off her costs,
Sapphire would have to drive one of Cadman’s trains

_ Alastair Reynolds

for a year. She’d spend 20 hours a day doing this - tran¬
sients didn’t need sleep - but for the remaining time she
would have access to all the world’s data nets; all the
simulated experiences she could desire.

There, now, it didn’t seem so bad, did it?

Finally, when the terms of the deal had been made
absolutely clear to her, Sapphire agreed to it. And there
followed a strange period of limbo, in which she was dis¬
connected from all input and her rate of computation
slowed to a crawl.

And then she woke up in the desert somewhere, at
night. Except she wasn’t really there; just observing, and
this guy who looked and sounded South American was
politely running over things again; telling her how she
was taking over this particular consignment because the
last transient had flipped, or something. And she’d
laughed at that, because while a year was a long time
to do something, it wasn’t so long, was it?

While behind this guy, she saw lots of dark, faceless
people milling around, carrying what looked like guns
and talking in an edgy melange of different languages,
none of which she could begin to place. And in the fore¬
ground, the weirdest kangaroos she had ever seen.

Welcome to the future, Sapphire thought.

Alastair Reynolds, a Welshman working as a scientist in the Nether¬
lands, has written several popular stories for Interzone, the most recent
of which were “Byrd Land Six” (issue 96), “Spirey and the Queen”
(issue 108) and “A Spy in Europa” (issue 120). Recently, he has finished
his first novel.

| Clarion West
| Writers
I Workshop

For writers preparing
for professional careers
in science fiction and
fantasy.

I Jun t

June 21-July 31,1998

Paul Park
George R.R. Martin
Connie Willis
Lucy Sussex
Gardner Dozois
Carol Emshwiller

INSTRUCTORS

Deadline for applications is April 1, 199B.
Write or call for information. $100 reduction
in tuition for applications received by March
1,1998. Women and minorities encouraged to
apply. Limited scholarships available.

Suite 350 340 15th A'
Seattle, Washington 98112 - USA
16) 322-9083

February 1998

Return to the
Nightmare

ft Country

Stephen Gallagher

interviewed by
David Mathew

"V IT 'Then Stephen Gallagher
%/%/published his novel Oktober in
V V1987 it was to be his temporary
farewell to genre fiction, at least as
far as his readers were concerned.
Never a writer to remain in one place
for very long, Gallagher used the
early part of his full-time career to
examine supernatural horror ( Valley
of Lights), Northern European leg¬
ends (Follower), dystopic science fic¬
tion (the novelization of his own
radio serial, The Last Rose of Sum¬
mer), and techno-horror (Chimera).
Oktober appeared, and here was Gal¬
lagher’s murkiest and probably most
ambitious novel at that juncture. A
Kafka-esque tale of a man literally in
the wrong place at the wrong time,
Oktober is a tale of chemical mal¬
practice on a continental scale, deal¬
ing as it does with a drug which
unleashes the collective subcon¬
scious. The unfortunate protagonist

is experimented on and afterwards
persecuted, not least in the hallu¬
cinogenic scenes in the Nightmare
Country. The book went on to out-sell
even the successful Valley of Lights.
But Stephen Gallagher was not rest¬
ing on his laurels. He published
mainstream thrillers for a while,
although some of the material he
presented during this time had been
written earlier.

Now, a decade on, Gallagher has
returned to genre fiction in that he is
currently directing Oktober for the
small screen: three one-hour episodes
for ITV which are now being filmed. I
asked him how it felt to be back.
There was no hesitation whatever:
“I’ve never really felt as if I’ve been
away. I know the most recent books
that I’ve done have been classified as
non-genre books, but during all that
time I’ve still been working to get
stuff like this off the ground. So it’s

not a return as much as I’m empha¬
sizing this side of the portfolio.”

Given that film-making one’s own
book is a chance to re-evaluate old
material, I wondered what new
strengths his screenplay had brought
to Oktober. “The script is in spirit
quite close to the novel, although in
detail I’ve been able to expand upon it
in quite a few ways. Bear in mind, it’s
a long time since I wrote the novel. I
first started working on the idea in
1983. The reason I know that is, it’s
the book I wrote before The Boat
House, and I wrote The Boat House in
1984 because that’s the year I got
hepatitis in Leningrad. Oktober came
out in 1987 and was picked up by a
producer and optioned in the late ’80s.
It lay quiet for four or five years. But
when I finally came back to it, I took
the approach that I always take with
adaptations, which is: I’ve done the
book; I don’t want to transcribe the

book, or repeat the book. Let’s have
some fun on the screen.”

Many writers want to be directors
on the sly, and some even become
successful directors. I wondered
where Stephen’s interest in film had
come from and where he had learned
to direct. He said, “I’m learning it
still. I did come equipped with a
number of the basics, because I’ve
always been a film fan, since I was a
kid. I had a Standard 8 camera as
soon as I could afford one, and as
soon as I could afford to I junked it
and got a Super 8 camera. Even now
I’ve got my 16mm in a cupboard at
home, although next to the machin¬
ery we’ve got on set it’s something of
an inferior toy. Film-making is some¬
thing that’s always been dear to me,
and in a sense something I’ve always
done. When I was five I made my
first projector out of a shoebox with a
torch inside it. I drew my own films
on pieces of polythene and projected
them on the living room wall. So
there’s nothing I’m doing now that
isn’t an extension of what I was
doing then...

“I’ve mugged up a lot on theory;

I’ve played around; I’ve worked in
cutting rooms. It still doesn’t prepare
you entirely for the huge amount of
technical responsibility that you have
on the set. But what I have to say is
that I have an extremely good crew
who support me and guide me in all
that. The procedure on the floor
tends to be: I go in with a very clear
idea of what I want to achieve at the
end but no absolutely set way of get¬
ting there. In discussion with the
director of photography, the camera¬
man and the first assistant director,
we work out how to achieve what we
need to - and then I step back. Then
there’s this marvellous spectacle of
all these people absolutely flogging
their sodding guts out to make it
come right! You set these things in
motion and then you wait for it all to
come together.”

Stephen Gallagher is a confident
and calm presence on set, and he has
clearly earned the respect of the peo¬
ple with whom he is working. He
does not need to raise his voice and
the professionals around him seem
happy in their tasks. When I asked
him if he based his film-making style
on any director, living or dead, he
told me: “I’m just trying to tell the
story. We’ll see at the end of the day
if I have a film-making style or not.”

In the past, Gallagher attempted
to raise other film adaptations of his
own work off the ground, to varying
degrees of success. Oktober is the
first of his novels to be transferred to
the screen. What did he think this
particular project had which the oth¬
ers might not have had? Why had
Oktober been successful?

“It’s a meshing of the wheels of the
mechanism of the universe! They
come together or they don’t. Most of

the time they don’t, and then occa¬
sionally they do. And when they do I
have no explanation as to why they
do. I have the same bag of tricks that
I’m constantly putting on offer. Then
every now and then I’ll meet the
right combination of people at the
right point in history where my little
bag of tricks fits in nicely. It can be
something as ridiculous as it was
with (the TV adaptation of) Chimera.
What started that off was that a TV
company had negotiated a slot for a
drama and its co-production partner
pulled out, and they suddenly needed
a four-hour drama. My script was
more or less ready to shoot, so they

Above: Stephen Tompkinson in Oktober
(photo courtesy Channel 5 Broadcasting Limited)

said, ‘if we give you a cheque for this
can you do what needs to be done?’ It
was as silly as that. It goes to prove
there’s no way you can hustle and rig
and make things happen. You just
have to be true to your own ideas,
and be consistent in your application
so that when the opportunity comes
you are 100% ready.”

What plans for the future does Gal¬
lagher have? At the end of 1996 he
was in discussions with his publish¬
ers, who at the time were not content
with the fact that he had characters
in his new manuscript, The Painted

Bride, who had been in some of his
earlier books for other publishers.
This would seem to be an enjoyable
method of cross-fertilization within
one’s own oeuvre (and one that
Robert Heinlein, among others, used
often) but I wondered if the situation
had been resolved. “Resolved in the
sense that I had to put the whole
caboodle on one side to concentrate
on this anyway. I have a book that’s
lined up and ready to go as soon as
this film is finished, which is going to
take me over to North Carolina. So
my intention is to press on with that
one and return to The Painted Bride
at a later date.”

What, then, is the next book pro¬
ject? “The working title is The Spirit
Box, and that will probably be the fin¬
ished title. It’s been through several
titles and that’s the one that’s stuck.
It’s about an English guy who’s com¬
ing to the end of a contract in a
research role in North Carolina. He’s
working for an extremely high-pow¬
ered, hi-tech company and his fam¬
ily’s been over there with him. Now
it’s the last day of his contract, his
wife has returned to England ahead
of him - so it’s just him and his
teenaged daughter. They’re clearing
out the house, and just as he’s hear¬
ing the phone line being disconnected
he looks up the stairs, and his daugh¬
ter is standing at the top. And she
says, ‘Daddy, I’ve done something
stupid.’ And what’s she’s done is take
every pill in the bathroom cabinet;
and this simple but very real and pos¬
sible incident sets in motion a chain
of events and a personal odyssey for
him that takes him right up to the
edge of accepted normal reality so
that he peeps over into the abyss.”

Gallagher has an inquisitive, self-
analytical mind, and he was quick to
dive into explanations about this
work in progress: “Although it’s a
realistic contemporary thriller in the
way that Red, Red Robin was, it does
venture into Oktober territory. So you
could say the book is a synthesis of
the two styles I’ve employed in the
past. Never consciously employing
them as two different styles, you
understand.” At what stage is the
novel? “It’s synopsized, it’s partly
researched: I’ve got my research con¬
tacts lined up over there to go and
meet. And I’ve had to put that all
aside because I’m on an exclusive
contract, which means I can’t work
on anything else but this film.”

Apart from novels, of course, the
author is well known for his shorter
fiction. His short stories pack a
strong emotional punch. I was among
a crowd that saw him read “Home¬
bodies” to an audience in 1991. There
was the atmosphere of a held breath,
and although it might be a cliche to
say it, you really could have heard a
pin drop. Does he still write short
stories? “I haven’t written any since

February 1998

Return to the Nightmare Country

the end of last year but I do still
write short fiction. Short fiction has
always been something I do between
projects - to decompress a little. And
what’s tended to happen of late is,
the projects have butted up very
hard against one another. There
hasn’t been the breathing space in
between.” Possibly, then, one day the
stories will be collected? “There’s
always a possibility of that, but then
it recedes when projects like this get
started! I still hope to see the short
stories out there in hardcovers one
day. It would make the most mega¬
anthology if you were to bung them
all into one book. About a quarter of
a million words, so it’d probably have
to be broken down into several vol¬
umes. When I was a kid my bedside
companion was The Collected Stories
ofH. G. Wells, and it would be great
to have everything in a fat volume
like that. Twenty-one shillings my
H. G. Wells cost!”

For the duration of the filming of
Oktober, Stephen has taken out a
temporary lease on a place to live in
London. I wondered to what extent
living in the north of England
informed his writing. “I think to a
greater extent than even I suspect,”
he replied. “Living down here in Lon¬

don I feel like a somewhat different
person, leading a somewhat different
life. I do hanker for the life I have in
the north, in the green fields, with
the graveyard opposite the study. Up
there it’s a very introspective life I
lead, somewhat solitary but not
lonely because I have the family and
a good group of friends around me.
But the crucial parts of my day when
I do my thinking I do it alone with no
pressure on me, apart from the pres¬
sures I create for myself. Whereas
here, all the thinking you do you do
on your feet. And you need very rapid
answers to very real problems.”

Gallagher has written short and
long fiction, and has now directed a
TV drama. Is there any medium he
would still like to work in? “I’d like to
try to a feature after this. It would be
twice the schedule and half the shots.
Doing three hours for television in
seven weeks is a tremendous kick-
bollock-and-scramble. Although you
do your best not to compromise, you
do realize that what goes out the
window is rehearsal time, improvisa¬
tion time, experimentation time. You
go in knowing what you want. Some¬
times it works; sometimes it doesn’t.
And if it doesn’t work, tough luck:
you’ve already moved on and you’re

in your next locale. With a feature,
you’re still working within con¬
straints but your constraints are a
little bit more user-friendly.”

Are there any other film projects in
the offing? “The Boat House and
Nightmare, With Angel are still very
active as film projects. I’m still
closely involved with both of them.
Rain I still have in a back pocket. I
was approached by a director a cou¬
ple of years ago who passionately
wanted to do it, but I wouldn’t let
him because I wanted to do it myself.
The great thing about filming Okto¬
ber is, it takes some of the heat off
me, some of the drive off me. I sus¬
pected that after I’d done this I’d be
so possessive of everything that I
wouldn’t let anybody near it. But
now I feel that I’d let other people
pick up the batons and run with
them. With my blessing, rather than
envy them every step of the way.
Because I’ve been there and I know
there’s a lot not to envy! Plus of
course I don’t want my future career
to be entirely consisting of retreading
my past career...”

On past evidence of Stephen Gal¬
lagher’s fondness for tackling new
subject-matters and styles, this
seems unlikely in the extreme. IZ

e The leading British
magazine which
specializes in SF and new
i fantastic writing. Among
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( have published

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RICHARD COWPER
JOHN CROWLEY
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one

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20

O ice upon a time there was a Princess who lived
in a palace on a mountain. The mountain was
like a tall blue wave that had turned to marble
in the air. The palace glittered on it like a golden dia¬
dem by day, and at night the stars filled its windows.
Gardens of peacocks and hyacinths surrounded the
palace, and fountains tumbled like silver silks to the
valleys below. From these facts alone, one sees it was
a wonderful place. One guesses at once how ordered,
beautiful, secure and pleasant was the life of the
Princess. Besides, she was in perfect health, her father
the King, and her mother the Queen loved and were
unstintingly proud of her, and she was betrothed to a
Prince of outstanding handsomeness, talent and virtue.

Then a morning came, like any other morning, with
the gold and silver light pouring through the crystal win¬
dows. The Princess woke up and got at once out of bed,
just as she always did, since she had always slept mar¬
vellously well and could not wait to start the new day.

She looked first at her slim white feet as they met the
summer tiles, and next at her slender ankles. She held
out her slim white clever hands, with their exactly oval
nails. And shaking her head, she absently noted her
mane of satin hair, which was tinted the colour of the
palest tangerine. But then, crossing the room, the
Princess saw into her mirror, and she stopped quite
still. For the mirror had changed. That is to say, the
mirror was just the same, pure glass in an artistic
wreathe of platinum, and held within it the room was
gleaming, and the Princess gleamed at the room’s cen¬
tre. But the face of the Princess was no longer her own.
“Who is that?” said the Princess, bewildered.

No one answered, not even the mirror, although now
and then, in those parts, mirrors had been known to talk.

The Princess went slowly closer. She leaned forward
and gazed in, holding back her hair with her hands.

There was nothing wrong with the face. It had two
eyes, a nose, a forehead, cheeks and chin, and lips. It
was even a well-made face, a lovely face - but it was not
the face the Princess had lain down in, not the face of
the Princess. Not at all.

The Princess whirled away. She counted to one hun¬
dred then turned back.

And there it was again, the face of a stranger,
perched up on the white tower of her neck, amid her
tangerine hair.

The King and Queen, who were breakfasting on the
white stone terrace 90 feet long, glanced up smiling to
greet the Princess. Their smiles turned to sunny stone,
like that of the terrace.

“Did you sleep well, my dear?” asked the Queen, a
superfluous but friendly question, which was generally
applied to guests. “Oh yes, thank you,” replied the
Princess, cautiously.

Her father turned from her, and pointed out instead
a brilliantly coloured bird in a magnolia tree.

Presently the Queen went in to see her jewelmaker,
and the king rose to go about his important affairs.

The Princess sat idly, with crossed ankles, scattering
crumbs for the sparrows.

A little before noon, her betrothed, the handsome
Prince, was seen riding through the gardens. Noticing
the Princess in the distance on the walk, the sun gleam-

The

Who

Lost

Her

Looks

Tanith Lee

ing on her tangerine hair, he set his horse into a can¬
ter, then, reining in, looked at her askance. “Oh, excuse
me. I thought you were the Princess.”

“I am,” said the Princess.

“Yes, of course,” said the Prince, “I didn’t mean to
imply lack of royalty. I simply meant, not my Princess.”

The Princess moved beside the Prince’s horse as he
guided it on along the lime tree avenue.

“Tell me about your Princess,” said the Princess.
“How long have you known her?”

“Several years in fact. Since we were only twelve.”

“Seven years, then,” said the Princess.

‘Yes. The magic number seven. This summer we are
to be married.”

February 1998

The Girl Who Lost Her Looks _

The Princess thought. She said, “And shall I tell you
about myself?”

“Please don’t trouble,” said the Prince. “I shouldn’t
like to tire you.”

The Princess said, “I’ve heard that you can hit a tar¬
get at 500 paces, and that you can paint a picture in oils
while galloping up and down full tilt on your horse.”

“Just so,” said the Prince. “It’s nothing.”

“And you must love the Princess very much.”

“We were made for each other.”

“By whom?” asked the Princess.

The Prince blinked. Then he cleared his throat and
sang, in an eloquent baritone, a popular song.

The Princess dropped behind at the steps to the ter¬
race, where the Prince dismounted, and, departing,
wished her a lovely day.

The brilliant bird from the magnolia tree was sitting
preening in a bush.

“What shall I do?” asked the Princess.

“Don’t cry,” said the bird, “pain needs no rain.”

“Why has this happened to me?” asked the Princess.
“Listen,” said the bird, “once you were a child, and in
many decades you will be an old woman. Things happen.”

“You don’t help me.”

“Did I say I would?”

The Princess went back to the palace and walked
through her rooms. She covered her mirrors with shawls.
Then she took out her favourite dresses, and a long string
of pearls that had been her grandmother’s, and some
emeralds that had been her aunt’s, and a pair of gloves
her betrothed had given her stitched with roses. She
looked at her books and at her painting materials, and
at her spinet, tuned exactly for her light quick hands. She
watered the flowers in pots of alabaster for the last time.

About three o’clock, the Prince was teaching a new
card game he had invented, to the King. It had often
seemed to the Princess her father liked the Prince even
more than she did. The Queen was directing gardeners
in her summerhouse of exotics. Everything went on in
its serene-and-always fashion. And the Princess went
down the palace stair, and down through the gardens -
where only a kitchen maid saw her, and seemed afraid.
But the Princess was not used to speaking to kitchen
maids. Going out of the gates, where the sentries did not
recognize her, the Princess took the road beside one of
the silver fountains, and descended to the valleys below.

In the valleys were examples of jolly peasant life. Only
happy and hearty peasants were allowed to live so near
the mountain palace. If they grew melancholy or fell
sick, they were taken away to be cared for somewhere
much more distant. Pink-cheeked girls tended the
vines, brawny farmers worked the ploughs, which were
drawn by glossy oxen. Herd boys piped evocative
melodies. The sheep looked recently washed. Even the
deer, which were regularly hunted for the King’s table,
moved calmly, burnished as nuts in the chestnut woods.

By sunset, however, the valleys were crossed, for the
Princess was fit and had walked fast. As the sun sank
like the ripest cherry, turning all the leaves and grasses
reddish gold, she saw a blot of darkness that lay only
a mile or so ahead. It was a great forest, dark and
closed by the doors of approaching night.

The Princess sat on a warm mossy boulder. She had

eaten fruit from the valleys, and drunk water from their
streams. She was not hungry, but felt that tiredness
which makes one restless. As the last juice of the red
sun dripped away, she got up and walked on, and so
straight into the dark forest.

Owls cried in the trees. Shafts of moonlight pierced as
if through vaulted openings of midnight churches, and
showed badgers playing and fighting in the undergrowth.

The Princess, for now it was late, paused in a glade,
and watched these black and white creatures. Each of
their masks looked very like the others.

She said to them, “Do you see, this isn’t my own face.
I don’t know if mine was stolen from me, or if it simply
escaped out of a window.”

One of the badgers, a huge tusked male, stood up and
stared at her. “You humans have no faces,” he said.
“What you say, therefore, makes no sense.”

But when the badgers had gone, an owl alighted on
the tree above and folded its white wings. Its eyes were
suitably the fractured gold of church windows set into
the wood.

“I have no one to turn to,” said the Princess.

“Nor have any,” said the owl. “Turn to yourself.”

“But which way?”

“If you wish to be sad,” said the owl, “walk in a direc¬
tion that seems sad to you. If you wish to be in danger
then proceed in a dangerous way.”

“Neither of these,” said the Princess. “I only want to
find myself.”

“Then walk,” said the owl, “in a direction that looks
to you, like you. It’s simple, you see.”

But then it called in its own savage shrill tongue, and
soared up to the moon.

The Princess slept an hour, and when she woke the
sun was rising. The forest was lit with green, and a
path ran through it made of small pale orange flowers.
“Perhaps the owl lied,” said the Princess. But she had
never heard that they did. So she followed the path.

She followed it all day, eating now and then wild
apples and grapes that flourished early in among the
trees. In the afternoon, the forest opened like a curtain,
and she saw before her a dry and rocky wasteland.
Nothing grew on it except a ruined tower, which was
quite near. As she went on, a man came out of the door¬
way. He was tall and strong, but he had the face of a
dog. That is, he looked as a dog looks which has been
kept wanting things that would have been good for it,
and trained to be vicious.

“If you pass through this waste,” he said, “you must
pay me a toll. Who are you?”

“I am a Princess,” replied the Princess truthfully.

“Excellent. Then you can pay a Princess’s toll.” He
took her arm and led her into the tower. It was a gloomy
place, dirty, with an old grey smell. The dog-man indi¬
cated a bed. “Lie down. It will soon be done with.”

The Princess said, “Excuse me please. I was joking.
I’m not a Princess at all - I am - a washerwoman.”

“Then you can pay a washerwoman’s toll. Lie down
on the bed. It won’t take long.”

The Princess said, “All the tolls are the same, then?”

“To me,” said the man. “Not necessarily to those that
pay them.”

The Princess went to the bed and lay down. The man
came bounding and jumped, dog-like, on top of her. As

22

Tanith Lee

he took the toll she gazed up at the roof-beam, where
a black raven sat.

“Pain needs no rain,” said the Princess to the raven.

“Flowers do,” said the raven. From its eyes fell two
bright tears and dropped on the Princess’s cheeks, gentle
as dew. “I have cried for you, this time,” said the raven.

The man had finished taking the toll, so the Princess
got up and shook out her skirts. She was surprised to
hear now it was the man who wept into the pillows.
“None of them are the one I want,” he wept.

The raven accompanied the Princess from the tower.

“How shall I bear it?” said the Princess.

“You mustn’t try to bear it,” said the raven. “Cast it
away on the wind. Let the wind bear it, like a bird.”

“But it was done to me,” said the Princess.

“Would you rather keep the hurt with you, to carry?
It’s very heavy. Throw it away. Or I’ll wrap up its mem¬
ory for you in black paper, and you can strap it round
your neck, and always look at it and feel the weight.
Throw it away on the wind.”

Just then the wind blew across the waste and the
Princess threw the price of the toll she had had to pay
on to the wind. The toll-price became another black
raven. The wind bore it up. It sailed off over the waste.

“Whose hurt then are you?” the Princess asked the
other raven.

“His,” said the raven, “the toll-taker. I sit on the roof-
beam over his head. At night I tear his liver.”

The Princess rushed from the tower. She sped all day
and all night, and the stars broke through the sky like
the windows of all the palaces set on mountains, and
pain needing no rain ran with her and within her. But
as the dawn came again she saw a town lying below,
white and sparkling, as if a cup of sugar had been
spilled beside a river’s clean silver spoon.

The town was sweet as sugar and icing and honeycomb.
One might break small pieces off the sides of buildings
and nibble them for sustenance. And the sunlight
poured down like golden molasses and strawberry wine.

Soon the Princess came to a market place.

Lions were dancing to an orchestra and parrots told
fortunes. A feast was laid out on tables for any to help
themselves, but the Princess began to see that the pay¬
ment for this was to be kicked or spat on or slapped by
a line of big men and women in red aprons. A fountain
splashed into a sugar-stone bowl, and nearby was a booth
with a banner planted before it, and on the banner were
painted these words: Lost Looks Refound. Or Improved.

The Princess went close. A woman was standing in
the booth, crying. She said she had grown old, which
was true. From a box they brought her a sealed vase,
and when she uncorked it, rays of light spread up into
her face. The woman laughed with delight, and her face
altered. It was still old, but now it was beautiful. She
paid with a silver coin, and came out with a lilting step.
Seeing the Princess hesitating the woman said, “Don’t
wait, dear. Go in. They know what they’re about.”

Even while she said this, a boy pushed by and went
to the people in the booth. He had a scar down his face,
a terrible scar, ridged black and purple. One of the
shadowy figures brought him a dagger, and put it
against his cheek. The scar metamorphosed. It had
become the dagger. When one looked in his face now,

one saw at once he had been wounded honourably. He
strode from the booth, proudly, his head held high. And
he had paid with a new-laid egg.

The Princess stole into the booth. She tried to make
out who the people were, but they seemed like reflec¬
tions in unstill water.

“One morning,” said the Princess, “I glanced in my
mirror, and my face was no longer my own.”

A dove sitting on the counter said, “Throw your mir¬
ror away.” And a lark on a swing called down, “See
yourself in another’s eyes.”

“That won’t do,” said the Princess. “In the eyes of oth¬
ers I became no one. I’ve been rejected and forgotten, I’ve
been abused. I’ve walked for miles and look, the soles of
my feet are worn through. But it’s my face I want back.”

Then one of the shadows came up, and the Princess
saw this was truly an old, old woman, and she seemed
to have no face left, only rags, but her eyes were soft,
as if they shone in a mist.

“Go to the Tavern of the White Pillar. Your face is to
be seen there.”

‘What price do you ask?” said the Princess, dubiously,

“What do you have?”

“Nothing,” said the Princess. “I left home in a hurry."

The old, old woman whispered to herself. Others of
her kind came up. They were also ancient, with ragged
rag faces, eyes of mercury in fog. Surrounded, the
Princess clenched her fists.

The hag said, “Pay nothing now, then. You will owe us.”

“I’d so much rather not.”

But the Princess found herself out on the street and
looking up over the market, she saw an inn with blue pil¬
lars, and one huge white pillar, from which a flock of star¬
lings were chipping off tiny gems of icing-sugar frosting.

Getting out of a carriage by the door was a girl in
wild rich clothing, and necklaces of hammered gold. Her
hair was the yellow of young apricots, and she had the
Princess’s face. There was no doubt in the mind of the
Princess at all. The forehead and brows and eyes, the
nose and cheeks and chin. The lips.

And with the Princess’s lips the unknown Girl called
loudly, and out of the tavern hurried a cupbearer, and she
drank thirstily from the big glass cup, drank all the wine,
then smashed the cup flamboyantly against the sugar pil¬
lar. With a dancer’s step she flashed on into the inn. After
her sprang a retinue sounding tambourines and bells,
and a cry of greeting rose raucously from inside.

A parrot sat on the fountain’s rim. It said, “Fear
makes the spear. Bliss makes the kiss. But who will
hear when I tell them this?”

“These riddles!” cried the Princess, and she meant
to wrench at her hair in anger. But she found her hair
was cropped short, only like a bristle of fur on her
head. For the booth of Refound Looks had taken a sud¬
den utter payment three minutes earlier, and she had
never even noticed.

All the long day, the Princess sat in the Tavern of the
White pillar, harried by inn servants who wanted her
to buy a drink or a meal, and who threatened to throw
her in the street. Finally she bought, with the border
off her dress, a goblet of beer. But she only sipped it,
and so they harried her again.

The Princess was intent upon the Girl with apricot

February 1998

The Girl Who Lost Her Looks

hair, who sat at her own table, eating and drinking,
from a line of dishes and wines and fine liqueurs, cof¬
fees in amber cups and chocolate in blue porcelain.

All this time the musicians made music for her, loud,
clashing songs. And the lions were brought in and
danced for her, and then the chief lion shared her couch
and she hung him with a lily garland and tickled his
ears until he snarled.

Who was this Girl? Who could she be? She was
untamed and incautious, greedy, arrogant, loud and full
of energy. She tossed her head and sang and told jokes,
some of which were actually very amusing. And once,
when a man at a neighbouring table mocked her, she
threw a knife that parted his hair.

Amber coffee day melted to the chocolate and blue
porcelain of dusk.

Torches were lit outside, and in the inn the lamps
burned fiercely high. The starlings had come in and
twittered stickily on the rafters. They did not talk,
which was a relief to the Princess.

But, “What shall I do?” she asked. And when no one
attended or answered, she got up and went across the
crowded room, and stood in front of the wild golden Girl.

“What do you want?” said the Girl, indifferently, and
with no recognition either.

“You have on my face. Either you stole it by magic or
bought it from thieves. You must give it back.”

“Your face? Yours? What rubbish. This is mine, and
besides, you have one of your own. If that one isn’t yours,
from whom did you steal it? You’re the thief, not I.”

Dumbfounded the Princess stood her ground, but two
of the inn servants came up now and seized her. They
put her out of the inn door and slammed it.

When the Princess beat on the door, someone emp¬
tied a pail of nightsoil on her cropped head.

She lived like a beggar in the town, scraping sugars off
the walls with her nails, which were now long and
uneven, drinking from the public fountain. She watched
for the Wild Girl who had her face. The Wild Girl came
and went in her carriage, always attended by her noisy
retinue, drums, tambourines and shouts. Into booths
and shops she passed, and about the parks, where enor¬
mous dogs put up their paws on her shoulders. She
went to the inn of the pillar, emerging at midnight with
harps, mandolines and howls. At last the Princess fol¬
lowed the Wild Girl to her home. She was enabled to do
this because, on that night, the Wild Girl’s carriage was
pulled to her gate by some of her admirers, four strong
men, and went quite slowly.

The house lay behind a high wall, and cinnamon
trees hung over the wall. The Princess sat down at the
wall’s foot as the clamour of the Wild Girl’s homecom¬
ing died away.

A monkey rustled in the boughs overhead. Thinking
it a bird, the Princess refused to look up. In any case,
the monkey said clearly, “Don’t you have a question?”

The Princess did not speak.

The monkey said, “Do you know, once I was a king. I
ruled a kingdom vast as a sea. Thirty armies were at my
bidding. My crown was made of gold, rubies and chryso¬
lites, so heavy I could never wear it, and a giant held it for
me always over my head. But then I offended a witch, and
now I’m as you see me, a monkey in a cinnamon tree.”

24

“Why have you told me this?” asked the Princess.

“To alleviate your boredom. It was a lie.”

“Did the owl lie? Did the raven lie?” asked the
Princess. “That woman in there has my face.”

“The face of a monkey is like a human face,” said the
monkey, “but we are more beautiful.”

“How can I get into the woman’s garden?” asked the
Princess.

“Catch hold of this bough that I’ll swing down to you.”

And the monkey swung down the bough and the
Princess caught hold of it. She was so slight now from
her travelling and from living on nothing but sugar and
water, that the bough sprang back with her and she
was on the wall’s top.

The monkey laughed, without showing its teeth. It
darted away, and the Princess climbed down into the
garden of her enemy, the Wild Girl.

It was a pretty garden, but quiet. Starlight dripped
from the grass-blades, and on the paths the stones mir¬
rored the moon. Across a lawn with one still pool, the
house had no lighted windows, and not a sound was
now to be heard.

Then a lamp bloomed in an upper window. The
Princess saw the Wild Girl going to and fro, combing
her long apricot hair.

A creeper grew on the wall. The Princess climbed up it.
She stood on the balcony outside the Wild Girl’s window.

First the Wild Girl plaited her hair, then she cast off
her jewels and necklaces. Then she threw off her dress
and put on a nightgown the colour of milk. And then -
and then - turning to her mirror, and having undone
some little glittering hooks, and spoken a magic word,
she took off her face.

“Ah,” said the Princess. She bowed her head.

In a tree a nightingale sang, “Pain needs no rain to
grow. The heart is happier to beat more slow.”

“Who’s there?” said the Wild Girl, coming briskly to
the window. She had a nice face without the other one,
ordinary and appealing. The Princess shrank back, but
the face saw her with its two mild eyes. “Oh, what a pest
you are,” sighed the Wild Girl. She worked the catch of
her window. “Come in, then. Let’s have it over with.”

“You think,” said the Wild Girl, now a Mild Girl, “I
have your face.”

“There it is,” said the Princess, “on that stand.”

But in the comer beyond the lamp, the removed face
seemed now only like a drooping flower.

“Well,” said the Mild Wild Girl, “go over and take a
proper look.”

So the Princess went and looked at the face. She
looked a long time. Then the Girl stole up, and all at
once she held before the Princess a shining mirror.

What did the Princess see? Certainly not the face she
had woken with that morning in the palace, the face no
one had known. This was another face again. It was
spare and hungry, with wide sombre eyes. And the bris¬
tles of hair had grown out brown.

“I was bom in a palace, but since then I’ve been
rejected and abused,” said the Princess, “and shorn.
That has changed it, this face, to what you see.”

“Some say,” said the Wild Mild Girl, perhaps ran¬
domly, “that a man lives in a tower in a waste. Each day
he puts on the face of a dog because he thinks dogs are
unclean beasts and so too he thinks of himself.”

interione

Tanith Lee

“Yes,” said the Princess. She shuddered.

Outside the nightingale sang, but now it sounded
only like a nightingale.

“And is that face on the stand truly your face, then?”
asked the Girl.

“I thought that it was.”

“Then it must have been,” said the Girl, “rather like
that face which you wore in your palace. Of course,
going out I put on a glamorous and gaudy face. It’s my
public face for the town. They expect it. They say, Oh,
here she comes, that loud wild girl. I pet lions and
throw knives. Only intimates ever see this face. And
now you’ve seen it too. But my loud face you mistook for
your former face because, I assume, your former face
was also loud and proud and gaudy.”

‘Yes,” said the Princess. ‘You’re quite right. It was arro¬
gant and brave. It gave orders, and played the spinet bril¬
liantly and danced till dawn. Sometimes it took me riding,
and I could outrace everyone but my betrothed. Even my
betrothed, actually. But I never did - was that the face
or... this other face? Was it tact - kindness - fear ? But lis¬
ten to me - that face was mine. I was — used to it.”

“Nevertheless,” said the Girl, “one night you took it
off, possibly without even noticing. You must have been
sick and tired of it.”

“If I took it off, where did I lay it down?”

The Girl shrugged. “Or you hid it, perhaps?”

“It was mine - mine - mine!” cried the Princess.

“Tears are wet,” sang the annoying nightingale, “but
they dry. Never forget, they are made by the eye easy
as pie.”

The Girl opened the window and said severely, “Be
quiet, or tomorrow you shall go in a pie.” The nightin¬
gale flew off cackling like a goose. The Girl added, “They
know I never eat nightingales.”

The Princess rose. She said, “I must walk back all
that long way. And look for my proper face.”

The Mild Girl said nothing. She got into her bed and
blew out the lamp.

In darkness, the Princess climbed from the balcony and
down the creeper, and went carefully through the garden.

Over the town and the silver spoon river, the dawn
was beginning like a rosehip sauce. The roofs were like
Turkish Delight.

“They are too sweet here,” said the Princess, as she
trudged away.

The Princess walked and walked. She walked back
through the horrible waste, and near twilight, although
not the twilight of that first day, she saw the ruined
tower. The man with the dog-like face was prowling
round it, and the raven was sitting on his shoulder,
peering down at the spot where the man’s liver must be.

“If you pass through this waste, you must pay me a toll.”

“I will,” said the Princess, and she spat on him.

“That will do,” said the man, “it’s all I’m worth.”

Later she came to the forest, and walked all night
over the ferns and roots, but she saw no badgers and
the owls were silent.

Eventually she reached the valleys under the moun¬
tain. She met a girl who was sobbing because her
mother had died, but this girl quickly hid her tears, pre¬
tending they were jewellery she had bought and held
against her cheeks. And there was a dead stag that had
February 1998

been hunted. No one spoke to the Princess, instead gen¬
erally they shooed her off. They shouted things into the
air about beggars and scroungers, and escaped pris¬
oners whose heads had been shaved.

The way up the mountain like a sea-wave of marble,
was much harder than the path down, but after some
time she reached the palace walls. She knew no one
would ever let her in at the gate, so she wandered about
until she found a hole that foxes had made. Through
this she squeezed, being now very thin and having no
long satiny pale tangerine hair to catch on anything.

Night fell from its colossal height, and by the hour
the Princess reached the palace itself, all the starry
lights were burning bright as tigers.

When she stood on the terrace, and looked into the
ballroom, the Princess saw the chandeliers resembled
suns, and the dancers whirled. Every so often, the men
would raise the women high in their arms, and the
women would toss their heads and clap their hands,
their hair and their fingers netted by emeralds and
pearls. And then the Princess saw the Prince, clothed
in cloth-of-gold, and he was flaming with enthusiasm
brighter than anything, and in his arms he raised high
a girl with tangerine hair, dressed with diamonds, and
clapping diamonded hands, and her face was the face
which the Princess had lost. Truly, this time, it was.

“She is the thief, then,” said the Princess. “And some¬
how she’s grown my hair from her head, too.”

Then she pressed herself to the window just as the
darkness did, and no one saw her at all, as if she was
only a shadow.

The Princess watched like one of the garden’s pea¬
cocks, all eyes.

She saw that the Prince clearly thought he danced
with the Princess, and drank wine with her, and on her
finger he placed a new ring, richer than any of the oth¬
ers. And the King and Queen too gazed at their impos¬
tor daughter lovingly and approvingly. And the servants
rushed to do her bidding. No one hesitated. They did
not know they had been duped.

At last, the guests were hot, and the terrace doors
were opened. The Princess, who had slipped aside
behind a hyacinth tree, noted who came out, and in the
end the dupe Princess did, arm in arm with the Prince.

Into the cool night gardens they went, billing and coo¬
ing and saying to each other witty things. The Princess
stalked them to a glade, and here the Prince turned
into a thicket to listen to a nightingale which sang, “Oh
life will be the death of me.”

While his back was turned, the Princess seized the
impostor by her slender neck and choked her senseless.

“Is that you, my dear?” asked the Prince, not turning,
for he always paid attention to nature, and was writ¬
ing a clever book about it.

“Only a little cough,” said the true Princess, pulling
her own face free of her rival — and with it came the
mane of tangerine hair. “Why, you’re a kitchen maid,”
said the Princess.

“What is that, my love?” asked the Prince, irritated
to now that she kept interrupting his study of the
nightingale.

But the Princess put on the face she thought was
hers by right, and the false hair so like her own tinted
hair, and next the Princess-dress the kitchen maid had

25

The Girl Who Lost Her Looks

worn to the ball, and all the diamonds. And when the
Prince turned back to the Princess again, she said, “It
is bliss makes the kiss.”

And the Prince kissed her. It seemed he noticed no
change at all. But then, obviously, he never had.

They went back to the ballroom and danced until dawn.
After which, they put on fresh sumptuous garments, and
rode in the parkland of the King’s garden, and the King
and Queen waved them off from the 90-foot terrace. The
Prince shot three birds with a single arrow, while com¬
posing a song to the lute, and all this as they rode.

“How happy I am,” thought the Princess, aloud. And
when they galloped to the palace again, near dinner¬
time, and she glimpsed a kitchen maid sitting under a
shrub with her throat all black and blue, the Princess
smiled her own true regal smile, the smile of her own
true face. “I am myself again.”

But a thrush sang in a tree, “Oh life will be the death
of me.”

A few days passed, some nights. The Princess moved
in the palace like a bird in a cage. One morning she
came out and walked in the garden, for her feet, worn
through by walking, were changed for ever, despite her
face and hair and gown.

“How happy I am,” said the Princess, to her changed
feet. “To be as I was. To have what I had.”

And distantly, hearing a kitchen maid crying, softly
and hoarsely, the Princess thought, “Pain needs no rain.”

But then the rain came anyway, and washed the gar¬
den over. The peacocks spread their optic tails, the
hyacinths threw out their scent in a blue mist.

The Princess, who was alone and quite concealed,
took off her Princess’s face, and looked at it. In the rain
it was only another scented, drooping flower.

“Who am I?” the Princess asked. No one answered.
“Am I better here as this,” she continued, “or out in the
dangerous and uncertain, uncomfortable world of
forests and wastes, ruins and sugars. Is this face bet¬
ter, or the other face underneath, that changes?” And
no one spoke. The birds only sang their songs. The rain
played a tune, but it had no words.

The Princess’s feet shuffled. They wanted to go, to walk
the world. The face stared haughtily up at her and she
did not know it any more. She did not know herself at all.

Louder than the kitchen maid’s crying and the music
of the rain, she heard the clever handsome laughter of
the Prince, inventing a new perfume in a silken cham¬
ber, to amuse them all.

“Shall I stay, or shall I go?” said the Princess. “I can¬
not say, I do not know.”

And she sat still, almost faceless, in the falling rain,
to puzzle it out.

Tanith Lee is one of Britain’s most eminent writers of fantasy and
gothic novels, and we are delighted to welcome her to Interzone
for the first time. One speciality of hers is the writing of latter-day
fairy tales for adults, and she has been represented in all the
standard anthologies of that type of fiction in recent years (usually
alongside such well-regarded fabulists as Angela Carter and Jane
Yolen). A daughter of the actor Bernard Lee (who played “M” in
the James Bond movies for many years), she lives with her
husband on the Sussex coast.

M y daughter’s first doll was a
naked, degenitaled male aban¬
doned on the street, the only clue to
his identity - later confirmed by
forensic research as Prince Eric from
The Little Mermaid - the word DIS¬
NEY stamped on the back of his
neck. She called him Man, which
struck me as rather profound. “Man’s
leg fall off,” she would observe, with a
note of sorrow for us all.

These last times are certainly a
new dawn for Disney, as befits an
organization which positions itself
increasingly as the first fully-secular
world religion, with the canon of ani¬
mated features its sacred texts. If
you put your ear to the future, you
can already hear the inspirational
theme song of Hercules chirping out
from school assemblies in the post-
denominational multiculture that is
part of our millennial Disney World.
(Why, this is Disney World, nor are
we out of it.) “I can beat the odds/I
can go the distance/I don’t care how
far/I can be so strong...” Ask not what
this stuff is doing to our young peo¬
ple’s heads, or what kind of depres¬
sive baggage for later life is being
deposited by this relentless assur¬
ance that nobody has limitations,
that everyone is entitled to every¬
thing and capable of gratifying their
most inflated fantasies. This is a call
to faith, and to suffer the little chil¬
dren when the plate comes round.

Like any religious organization,
Disney has a covenant with its con¬
stituents and a need to reach out to
the masses. All Disney offerings since
its own Renaissance have been anx¬
ious about their material, and
painfully keen to avoid construable
disparagement towards such power¬
fully plutopsephic interest-groups as
women, Islam, native Americans, and
the differently-shouldered. As such,
though Hercules is New Disney’s least
embarrassed feature, it’s still eager to
reassure all those disenfranchised by
the white imperialists’ classical tradi¬
tion that its subject matter is now free
of any previous owners. The first play¬
ers on the scene are the very, ahem,
red-figure chorus of Muses, whose
African-American narratorial frame
reassures us that, whatever palefaced
European elites may have done
through the old millennia to appropri¬
ate Here and his buddies for their
own interests, today it’s Black Athena
who’s ultimately whooping the times.
And at least Hercules, unlike any
other classical figure bar Cleopatra,
can draw on a long and jolly postwar
tradition in popular culture, ever
since Joe Levine’s 1958 vehicle
splashed out an incredible $1M on
publicity to make Steve Reeves a star,
a cheesy dubbed Italian beefcake
movie an international blockbuster,
and Cinecitta sword-and-sandal
movies a picabudget production line
that eventually killed off the Holly¬
wood classical epic altogether.

And yet, Graecia capta ferum vic-
torem cepit. “Wouldya listen to him?” a
choreutes complains of Charlton Hes¬
ton’s prologue. “He’s makin’ the story
sound like some Greek tragedy!” But
it’s one of the delicious inexplicables
of modern cinema that every film to
come out of Hollywood is openly, sys¬
tematically modelled on a standard
template (diagrammed repeatedly in
standard works like Syd Field’s
Screenplay) that derives directly,
though in a weirdly-garbled form,
from a 4th-century BC tutor on how
to write Greek tragedies. As Francis
X. Feighan, author of The Screen¬
writer’s Companion, once memorably
said on a Moving Pictures: “You get
your character up in a tree, you throw
rocks at him for a while, and then you
get him down. And that’s your basic
three-act structure in the Aristotelian
terms.” It’s just a shame that books
III and up of Aristotle’s Poetics -
which dealt originally with explosion
movies, screwball romances, John
Grisham adaptations, relationship-
oriented chickflix, and coming-of-age
comedy vampire westerns - were all
destroyed at the end of The Name of
the Rose II, leaving only a few scat¬
tered fragments preserved in late
glossographers to bear witness to the
original screenwriting guru’s seminal
discussion of why pirate movies flop,
and his startling messianic prophecy
of the coming of Jennifer Jason Leigh.

ow, it has to be conceded right off
that, even by Hollywood’s own
classical standards, Hercules is phe¬
nomenally well crafted. For this deci¬
sive rebel assault on the cultural
fortress, Disney has sent in its A-
team of Musker and Clements - now
the most successful, and maybe the
best, feature-animation directors in
history - and even after Little Mer¬
maid and Aladdin this is easily their
finest hour. Though there are still
technical wrinkles in the blending of
CG and cel animation, particularly in
the hydra sequence, Hercules is gen¬
erally state-of-all-its-arts: tightly-
scripted, unusually funny, and
completely disarming even during
the feeble musical numbers, which
certainly aren’t much threat to The
Jungle Book. Above all, it’s simply
beautiful to look at, with stunning
backgrounds, some exquisite colour
paletting, and some astonishingly-
nuanced character rendering that
fully justifies the new-style end cred¬
its (where voice and animator are
bracketed side-by-side). Though
Scarfe’s designs absolutely deserve
their accolades, it’s in the execution
that the full virtuosity lies. It’s easy
to admire the performance of James
Woods as Hades - or rather, of
course, vice-versa, with the anima¬
tor’s delicate recreation of Woodsian
moues and mannerisms you only rec¬
ognize when you see them carica¬
tured. But there’s arguably even

MUTANT

POPCORN

better work in the visual characteri¬
zation of Susan Egan’s Meg, where
they don’t seem to have used the
actress so closely as a template; and
even the hero is the nearest thing yet
achieved to an appealing Disney
human-male lead.

At the same time, it’s pretty radi¬
cal stuff for Disney. The studio’s cre¬
ative trough in the 1970s and 80s is
often blamed on the way that, in the
dark days following the founder’s
death, the apostles would gather in
the boardroom and make decisions
by asking, “What would Walt do?”
And not the least impressive thing
about Hercules is that it’s hard to
imagine Walt doing anything
remotely like it. Certainly it’s the
first Disney feature to acknowledge
that the world of animation has been
changed by MTV, Nickelodeon and
Spumco: that the plump, cute look of
traditional Disney characters has
come to seem stilted and outdated,
and that the kind of plasticity
achieved in Aladdin’s genie can sus¬
tain an entire movie. Not only that,
but it’s confident enough of its style
to poke fun at Old Disney through
the incongruous disguises of the
Scarfean demons of Pain and Panic
as stubby, big-eyed Art Babbitt kids
spouting golden-age dialogue like
“Jeepers, Mister!”

Yet this very iconoclasm is unex¬
pectedly true to the spirit of its
mythic matter. It goes without saying
that there’s no such thing as authen¬
ticity in Greek myth; or rather, the
only true authenticity is radical
departure from all known previous
variants. Before its rapid ossification
in the fourth century BC, myth is a
dynamically recombinant and muta-

Februaty1998

Mutant Popcorn _

tional memetic lifeform sub¬
jected to one of the most
intensive hothouse breeding
programmes in the history
of the west: the fulfilment of
quotas for the Athenian
dramatic festivals with up
to two dozen new tragedies
and satyr-plays a year, out
of the same pool of 200 or so
recycled stories. There are
no correct versions; the only
thing that fixes one variant
as definitive for later ages is
canonization in a literary
text so famous that it fos¬
silizes the story against any
further mutation. But there
are no such works in the
Hercules myth-system: no canonical,
A-list classical texts dealing directly
and extensively with the hero’s
career, despite walk-on parts in
drama and epic, and a couple of
tragedies on darker versions of the
closing phases of his career. And it’s
this memetic adaptability that
makes myth interesting in the first
place. The process is driven by envi¬
ronmental factors: new variants
arise, compete for resources, and suc¬
ceed in reproducing because they fill
a niche in the cultural ecology that
supports them. Movies are just the
same: a chaotic, unpredictable form
of memetic engineering in which sto¬
ries are remade, updated, cannibal¬
ized and recombined in a relentless
struggle for existence in a world of
finite capital. Successful narrative
cliches propagate through the meme
pool like plot viruses, gobbling up
cash from the surrounding ecosystem
because they’re ideally adapted to
the efficient exchange of desire for
money that sustains the cycle of
growth.

Certainly Disney’s own mutations
offer a fascinating case study. Here’s
best girl Megara is more familiar to
the classical tradition as the wife the
hero kills ap. Euripides and Seneca
in a frenzied massacre of his family.
In Disney World, such distasteful
matters are image-edited out of the
picture - though you have to wonder
about the motives behind the inclu¬
sion of a line like “Meg, I would never
ever hurt you.” By comparison, in the
network-primetime universe of Her¬
cules: The Legendary Journeys, the
victim is wife no. 2 Deianeira (who in
Sophocles kills him slowly and
painfully in a 300-line death scene,
topping herself along the way), and
the offender is not the peaceable,
unpsychotic hero himself but his
divine nemesis Hera, jealous (as in
ancient sources) of Zeus’s extra-
hierogamous mortal nookie with
Alcmena. Unfortunately, this beget¬
ting, though canonized over and over
in 50 versions from Plato Comicus to
Cole Porter, is itself something that
nice Disney people just don’t do. So
in this version, Here is — amazingly —
28

conceived and born in legal divine
wedlock, and the equally-monoga-
mous Alcmena and Amphitryon
merely adopt him. (Brisk sounds of
subterranean gyration from Plautus,
Moliere, Kleist, Giraudoux, &c. &c.)

I n the event, though, even the most
rampant anachronisms and devia¬
tions in this Hercules looks rather
sedate by comparison with the far
cheekier Legendary Journeys, with
their dotty onomastics (one episode of
Xena sported a character called
Twickenham) and roaming gangs of
Mycenaean Maoris. Meanwhile, the
copyright-free nature of the material
is already breeding all-new memetic
variants: Tor currently have a work-
gang of Star Trek novelists churning
out an independent series of Her¬
cules novels - “New Adventures of
the Mightiest Hero of All!” - as a
mischievous spoiler to the Boulevard
TLJ spinoffs. What, rather, defines
Disney’s Hercules is its deeper, myth¬
ical authenticity: its respect for the
meaning invested in the figure of the
hero for each culture that retells
him. For archaic and classical
Greeks, Heracles was the embodi¬
ment of the mortal hero at the edge
of mortality, the summit of achieve¬
ment and pain where the mortal con¬
dition breaks through to the divine.
For Stoics and Romans, he was a cul¬
ture-hero and mythical model of ideo¬
logically-sanctioned behaviour. And
for Disney, Here is the human
embodiment of the American hero we
all aspire to become, whatever our
ethnicity, trading status, or level of
disposable income.

Despite its pagan setting and East-
Coast yiddishe repartee, Hercules is
Disney’s most openly biblical movie:
a distillation of the most extreme of
all neoChristian fundamentalisms,
playing to every American male’s
instinctive knowledge that, however
dysfunctional and pathetic he may
seem to the outside world, he is in
fact the Son of God and the indiffer¬
ence of the world to his unappreci¬
ated talents are merely part of His
passion. “Sometimes I feel,” says
Here to Ma and Pa, “like I don’t

belong here - like I’m supposed to
be somewhere else” (raises eyes to
heaven). (“Yes!” says the audience.
“That’s exactly how I feel too! Gee
whillikins, I must be the Messiah!
Golly, is this a feelgood movie or
what?”) The choral recitative
openly describes this version of the
legend as “the gospel truth,” and
the narrative dutifully chronicles
His divine begetting and becoming
man, skipping rapidly to His com¬
ing of age and setting forth to
prove his godhead (dismissing his
mortal parents from the rest of the
movie with a perfunctory “Mom,
Pop, you’re the greatest parents
anyone could have, but I’ve gotta
know”), and culminating in his con¬
quest of death, descent into hell, and
rising again to sit at the Father’s
right hand.

And yet, like all true myths, it’s
very much a gospel of its time. This
hero’s enemy is not sin, or suffering,
or the jealous celestial stepmother of
ancient sources, but the one true
nemesis of every American, personal
Death. (Guess who loses.) Explicit
religious teachings are confined to
cracker-barrel platitudes like “a true
hero isn’t measured by the size of his
strength but by the size of his heart”
(a line the schoolboy-minded will
already have completed elsewise).
Most tellingly, though the gospel nar¬
rative has been composited with
knowing grafts from Joseph Camp¬
bell by way of The Empire Strikes
Back, young Whattageek Destructo-
boy Jercules’s progress from zero to
hero follows a uniquely American tra¬
jectory in which it’s taken for granted
that the deal includes celebrity,
worldwide adulation, fabulous riches,
and orchestrated global franchising of
your name and likeness.

As in Jurassic Park, this is a com¬
plex kind of irony that tries to dis¬
arm you by nudging you that it’s
tongue-in-cheek: we have to under¬
stand that self-depreciating satire of
the “I’m an action figure” kind
doesn’t actually depreciate the sales
of, er, action figures. Rather, we
should understand that these mass-
produced plastic homunculi are not
graven images but icons, a lens
through which the soul can focus
more truly on the divine. Ditto, of
course, the lunchboxes, thick shakes,
thermofibre pie-warmers, et cetera ad
inf. : not just tools of merchandising,
but instruments of contemplation
and redemption to raise our eyes to
the stars. So sing, you pathetic little
runts: “I can beat the odds.” (Whap.)

“I can go the distance.” (Smack.) I
said SING.

Nick Lowe

Editor’s note: when he is not reviewing
movies for Interzone Nick Lowe teaches
Greek and Latin classics at the
University of London.

I t’s taken me a while, but I think
I’ve finally cracked this New Year’s
resolutions thing. What do you mean
“it’s February”? Now look, we aren’t
going to get anywhere if you’re going
to nit-pick. And anyway, it may say
February on the cover but I’ll bet
you’re reading this in January. And
anyway I’m not referring to the cal¬
endar but the anniversary: I resumed
writing this column exactly a year
ago. And anyway it’s my column and
I’ll do New Year’s resolutions if I
want to. Or a Christmas wish-list.
Whatever. I said don’t nitpick.

Christmas wish-list? Ah yes, here’s
the thing. That’s why my New Year’s
resolutions never get, well, resolved:
it’s because, I now see, there’s a dif¬
ference between wanting something
to happen and doing something to
make it happen - like for example
the way every year I resolve to lose
weight without resolving ever actu¬
ally to do anything about it like, well,
dieting or exercise. Sympathetic
magic as an agency of lifestyle trans¬
formation, I have to tell you, sucks.

So here’s my list of 1998 resolu¬
tions/wishes for sf and fantasy on
television. First, I resolve to find out
whether the Lewis Baumander who
appears on the credits of Deepwater
Black is the same Lewis Baumander
who directed Keanu Reeves when he
performed Hamlet in Winnipeg in
1995. (Well of course I was there! It
was minus twelve. The theatre made
the audience wait outside in the snow
instead of letting us in and parting us
from our money... and Kevin Sorbo’s
leather trousers pale into insignifi¬
cance next to the memory of Keanu’s
tights. Sigh.) Well I don’t care
whether you care or not -1 have a
retentive memory for useless trivia,
so every time I see the Deepwater
Black credits I wonder if it’s the same
guy, but I have absolutely no desire to
do anything so tedious and grown-up
as research and so I never manage to
overcome inertia long enough to do
anything to find out.

I had to have my video set on
weekly repeat to record Channel 5 at
2.30 on Sunday afternoons, because I
appear to be congenitally incapable
of actually remembering to sit down
to watch the series, and so I have an
astonishing collection of half-watched
episodes stuck in the middle of video¬
tapes of other stuff.

Deepwater Black is so High Con¬
cept it makes your teeth ache...

These teens may be clones, but they
seem to be the clones of Beverly Hills
High School brats as C5’s press
release had it (actually that makes it
sound much better than it is), the
plot premise is that teenage clones
awake on a spaceship to find they are
more or less the sole survivors of the
human race and their ship is carry¬
ing frozen genetic material to remake
the species after a plague wiped out
the rest of us. Yes! Teen characters

for the teen audience, carefully
colour-coded and gender-paired, but
with no background parents/sib¬
lings/schooling problems to weigh
them down and with a real Higher
Destiny to pursue.

So why didn’t it work? Well,
whether it was a Lewis Baumander
or the Lewis Baumander, Deepwater
Black didn’t have a Keanu in the cast
so the “Blue Lagoon” plot fix was
never going to attract my interest.
And unlike, say, C4’s teen angst-fest
Party of Five (don’t get me started on
Party of Five: I haven’t been so
hooked on a soapy plot since, oh, I
don’t know, since everyone, but every¬
one, stayed in on Sunday nights to
watch The Forsyte Saga. One of my
enduring memories of 1997 will be of
phoning the Channel 4 duty office in
anguish because my video cut out
before the end of an episode and a
soothing duty officer asking me how
far I’d got and then talking me
through how it finished - “and then
Charlie said ... and then you should
have seen Julia’s face...” Bless their
hearts!) All right, breathe, start a
new sentence - so, unlike, say, Po5,
Deepwater Black is too thin on char¬
acter-development, whilst simultane¬
ously being too heavy on plot.

Actually, Po5 isn’t a bad compari¬
son, being similarly stuffed to the
gills with teen angst: only its plot
development is all designed to illus¬
trate and promote character-develop¬
ment, where DB’s plot-development
is a random selection of standard sf
tropes strung together with bursts of
“it’s my turn to save the universe this
week.”

But I don’t know: why doesn’t it
work? Oh God, you don’t think it’s
just that I’m now Too Old to Get It?

Tube

Corn

Wendy Bradley

Moving swiftly on to my second reso¬
lution, I resolve to stop videoing
VR5. In this late-night burst of Fri¬
day-night tosh on BBC 2 the leading
character Sydney’s missing/drowned
sister is called Samantha - what’s
the name of Mulder’s sister in The X-
Files ? Yes, it’s Samantha. I’m sorry
but I don’t think you can get away
with lost Samantha siblings these
days. Been there, done that. VR5
isn’t good enough for this to work as
a conscious echo of Mulder’s alien-
abducted sibling but it isn’t (quite)
bad enough for it to be just sheer
carelessness. I resolve to stop video¬
ing it since I now have more
unwatched episodes of VR5 than

Below: Deepwater Black: from left, Gret, Reb, Bren, Lise, Zac and Yuna

February 1998

Tube Corn

blank tapes and, yes, they’re always
in the middle of a tape, so that you
can’t record the film you’re going to
miss without also wiping that
episode of Friends you haven’t
watched yet.

Why did I start videoing it? Now
what did I tell you about nitpicking?
It looked as though it was going to be
an sf series: Sydney is the survivor of
a pair of identical twin girls and she
has a gizmo which allows her to
enter virtual worlds she creates on
her computer out of the subconscious
of other people, and to take the other
people into VR5 with her if she can
get them on the end of a telephone.
Well, yes, but you have to accept the
basic premise to get any further.

Well, yes, obviously I have problems
with the “sucking people’s subcon¬
scious into a computer down the
phone” idea. Well, yes, I also have
problems with the “only Sydney can
do this” thread. Well, yes, only Syd¬
ney and the drippy hippy who lives
next door. Now look, what did I tell
you about nitpicking ?

The VR scenarios are filmed in a
kind of lurid “acid trip” colour-

letters continued from page 5

as it developed in the 1930s and 40s,
but that’s because Gemsback was fol¬
lowing a particular route. He wanted
to inspire his readers, most of whom
were gadgeteers, particularly with the
new sciences emerging through the
use of electricity.

When Amazing Stories came along
it had originally been Gernsback’s
intent to use some of the authors from
Science & Invention but he had the
wit to realize that all of that fiction
reproduced on its own had little com¬
mercial value. It was only because it
had been part of a technical magazine
that it made some sense. Most of them
were barely stories at all, but sketchy
narratives exploring the potential of a
new invention - though the Winthrop
story that Brian cites is one of the bet¬
ter ones. Gemsback needed to attract
writers first and foremost and hope¬
fully those with scientific training.
These were almost non-existent,
which is why he was forced to reprint
so much Veme and Wells material
(which he was also able to acquire
cheaply). Unfortunately Gemsback
was blinded by his own original con¬
cept, so that although he did get some
fairly good gadgeteer fiction, what he
discovered the readers clamoured for
were Burroughs and Merritt. With
Merritt he had a real problem,
because he did not regard his work as
scientifically based and he found him¬
self forced to find a way to explain its
use in Amazing. It became quite a
topic of discussion in the magazine. By
1928 the works of Doc Smith and
Edmond Hamilton had pushed sf into

scheme which is quite cool the first
time you see it, although the banal
gender stereotyping of the scenarios
themselves quickly makes this pall.
And, for all that I might have over¬
looked the idiocy of the “sinister gov¬
ernment agency takes over her
Dangerous Invention” running
thread for the sake of seeing the res¬
olution to the “my Dad was the Man
from UNCLE and he and Samantha
must have drowned for a reason”
plotline, I found after a couple of
weeks I couldn’t get over the kids
from Fame. Yes, well, I’m sorry, but
Lori Singer who played Sydney also
blighted the 1980s as the cellist in
Fame, and the stupider the VR5 plots
became the more I kept seeing her
sawing away on the cello with that
drippy expression on her face. So I’m
going to cut out the middle-man and
stop videoing it, letting it fester for a
month or two and then recording
over it, and just ignore it altogether.
There. I feel better already.

What else? Oh, lots of things. I
resolve to stop watching things that
have no new ideas about the future

the super-science cosmic league from
which it rapidly devolved to space
opera - though that happened in the
pages of Astounding. Gemsback tried
to avoid that happening in his new
magazine, Wonder Stories, and in fact
it was Gemsback who forced a revival
of quality in sf in Wonder in 1933-34.

Brian speculates as to why Ray
Cummings never wrote for Gemsback’s
sf magazines. It was all to do with
money. Gemsback’s worst feature was
that he was atrocious at paying
authors, even before the Depression. I
think he had the same attitude that
academic publishers have, and that is
that scholars write for the love of it and
don’t need paying. The contributors to
his technical magazines were often sci¬
entists or experimenters with other
income, so he tried not to pay them at
all or, if he did, he paid at the lowest
rates possible. He could never adapt to
the view that people out there were
writing for a living, and he found it dif¬
ficult to pay anything like a reasonable
sum. He had arguments with Bur¬
roughs and Wells over payments, and
they had the clout to make him pay at
least a bit more than the average,
which meant he forced other authors
into less than the average. Cummings
had few outlets in the mid-1920s
because Argosy All-Story had tem¬
porarily moved away from sf, so Gems¬
back was his only outlet (although he
wrote detective fiction for other pulps).
One o Astounding emerged at the end of
1929 Cummings found a genuine pulp
publisher prepared to take his material
and pay a good rate promptly. He
immediately deserted Gemsback.

What then happened was that
Astounding used pulp writers with

so that you see the 25th, 27th, 35th
century and think “been there, done
that” - now does that excuse me from
all incarnations of Trek, and where
do I stand on Babylon 5? You should
never, never, have to come away from
an sf programme thinking “I have
seen the future and it’s boring.”

I resolve that there will be British
sf that isn’t cutesy, Sunday-teatime,
Phoenix and the Carpet kidstuff but
also isn’t full of dour depressing
Manchester mobsters or Dirty Den.
And I resolve that, when there is
something British and designed for
an adult audience, it will last longer
than five minutes, have a budget of
more than five pounds, and get auto¬
matically commissioned for a second
series. We didn’t mean for Crime
Traveller to be killed off, just
improved a bit! And I resolve there
will never, ever, be another series of
Bugs. And to win the lottery.

Ah no; that’s that want-something-
to-happen / make-something-happen
thing again, isn’t it? Picard to bridge:
make it so.

Aw, go on.

Wendy Bradley

no grounding in science at all (or
very little) to produce pseudo-scien¬
tific adventure stories and these soon
degenerated into rubbish. There was
a tremendous outcry at the time and
it was Gemsback, through David
Lasser, who did what he could to sal¬
vage some quality from sf and reform
it. If anyone reads the stories in Won¬
der Stories during 1932-33 they will
see how much better they were than
anything in Astounding and, to a
degree, in Amazing.

Brian overlooks all of this. Whilst
in general I agree with his view of
Gemsback - he was something of a
scoundrel, there is no doubt about
that -1 cannot support his conclusion
that Gemsback did not believe in the
potential of the medium for scientific
speculation. That is a gross slur upon
Gemsback. It was at the very heart of
all that he did believe in.

But he fell victim of two things: (1)
his financial practices and (2) his
inability to match the potential of sci¬
entific adventure stories within the
confines of his “gadgeteer” fiction. He
broadened this latter view as much as
he could, but he could never take it as
far as Tremaine did in Astounding
after 1933. He was of a very similar
mind to Campbell - their approach to
sf is extremely compatible - but
Campbell had the wider super-science
vision, whereas Gemsback still liked
the kitchen-table invention approach.

I’m half-inclined (had I the time) to
produce a full-scale rebuttal to
Brian’s article, because I do think it
denigrates Gernsback’s contribution
to sf, but maybe I’ve said enough.
Mike Ashley

30

Douglas Smith

Friday, December 19, 1997

Bogey pushed his black queen’s pawn forward to meet
John’s then leaned back. “Rick’s Cafe Americaine”
throbbed white neon at John through a haze of
cigarette smoke. Wobbling overhead, fans swirled the
smoke in lazy eddies among crowded tables.

“Another closed defence,” John muttered.

“You’re a closed kinda guy,” Bogey replied, immacu¬
late in a white jacket and linen shirt, black bow tie and
slacks. The beginning strains of “As Time Goes By”
wafted from a piano somewhere off-display. He glared
over his shoulder, motioning to a plump white-haired
waiter in a black tuxedo. “Carl, get me a whisky, and
tell Sam to stop playing that damn song.”

‘Yes, monsieur Rick, and for you, monsieur?”

“Mr. Dunne doesn’t drink, Carl,” Bogey said. “He
hasn’t figured that part out yet.”

Carl waddled away as John reached for his king’s
knight.

“Predictable,” Bogey muttered.

John scowled at him but a trilling sound cut off his
reply. A telephone appeared, hovering above the table.
Bogey lit another cigarette. “Still bothers me when it
does that.”

“And your smoking still bugs me,” John said.

“Then you shoulda left smell out of the equation, kid.
Answer the damn thing, will ya?”

The call display on the phone showed an internal
PCWare extension and the name ‘G.Hong’. John spoke.
“Hi, George.”

The ringing stopped, replaced by a disembodied
voice. “J.D., my man, you still gonna walk me through
it Monday?”

“Um, sure, yeah, I guess. Nine okay? Down here?”

“Be there. Have a good weekend. Ciao.” Dial tone.

The phone vanished. “Um, I gotta go now,” John
muttered.

Shrugging, the man in the white jacket tipped over
John’s ivory king. ‘Well, you woulda lost anyway. Again.”

John’s jaw clenched. “Why do you try to irritate me?”

Bogey blew a cloud of smoke at him. ‘You tell me, kid.
You’re the programmer.” He waved his hand around.

“Probably revenge for what you did to my place.”

“What do you mean? It’s digitized right from the film.”

‘Yeah, but you colourized it!” Bogey glared at him, pok¬
ing a finger at John’s chest. “The important stuff in life
is black and white, kid. Good guys, bad guys. Winners,
losers. Us, them. Ones and zeroes. Everything else is just
shades of grey. You’ll be happier when you learn that.”

“So what am I?”

“A good guy mostly. A loser always. One of them. A
zero. Going back to her now?” He smiled. “Sure you are.
At least in here, she’s there when you get home.”

“Shut up!” John snapped, manipulating his finger
controls to move through the crowded bar. The chuckle
behind him faded.

Saturday, December 20, 1997

Washington Post: “Millennium Nightmare? - As we enter
a new millennium, will our computers rerun the old one?
For years, computer systems stored dates with only the
last two digits of the year. The software simply stuck ‘19’
in front when needed for display or calculations. Why?
Well, it saved two bytes for each date in the system. Stor¬
age was expensive and smaller records meant faster I/O.
Such systems would store today’s date as 971220 (year-
month-day for sorting). However, on January 1, 2000, a
system with six-digit dates will merrily inform you the
date is January 1,1900, based on its stored date value
of 000101. Analysts estimate Year2000’ code fixes will
cost $600 billion worldwide, and predict over 90% of cur¬
rent systems will fail on January 1, 2000.”

Sunday, December 21, 1997

At a bare white table in his small apartment, Ed Lochs
nursed a beer as he dialled into the PCWare LAN from
his home machine. Suspecting all was not well with his
job at PCWare, Ed had used his role as a support tech
to install a program on the company’s internal network.
The program scanned E-mail traffic for message text
containing his name, encrypting a copy of any such
message to a file in Ed’s private directory.

Now at home, he downloaded that file and entered a
decrypt string. Messages for the week rolled in black

February 1998

New Year’s Eve

and white across his monochrome screen. On the third
one, he stopped. Shit.

TO: Sanjit Mohammed-taki, HR Director
FROM: Donald Masatoshi, VP New Products
DATE: 12/19/97

TOPIC: Employee Termination Notice needed
Sanj, as discussed, please prepare an ETN for Edward B.
Lochs, effective January 6,1998, based on three consec¬
utive performance ratings below 4.0. Thx, Maz.
Asshole. Taking a swallow of beer, he switched screen
windows and ran a program prepared weeks before. It
finished and a grin creased his pale unshaven face. Con¬
necting to the network again, he copied the program to
a Project VR directory of modules which interfaced to
date routines in PCWare’s Portals 7.0 operating system.
He entered his password as a VR team member to
replace the existing program and signed off.

Have to wait a while, two years and a bit, but it’ll be
worth it. Swallowing the last of his beer, he raised the
bottle in a mock toast. “Happy New Year!”

Monday, December 22, 1997

After losing again to Bogey, John stepped from the bar
onto New York’s 5th Avenue, the Santa Claus parade
underway. A huge penguin loomed from a passing ice¬
berg float. Crowds watched in a light snow, the air crisp
with car fumes and people smells.

Hey, cool! I love parades.

The voice made John jump. “Jesus, George! You
scared me.”

Sorry, compadre. I said hello, but you didn’t answer
so I just grabbed the other VR unit. So where are we?

“New York, 1946, December morning.”

Man, it looks real! A lot better than version zero.

“We use full multimedia links with WorldSource -
TV, movies, news, songs, documentaries, encyclopedias,
almanacs...”

And everything else our fearless leader bought rights to.

The clip-clop of passing Clydesdales cut through
George’s words, moving gradually from John’s left to
right ear.

Hey! You’ve got directional sound.

“We track head movement relative to the sound
source in the scene, adjusting the volume in each ear
accordingly.”

Holy shit! Literally. I smell the horses, popcorn...

“We code scenes with aroma keys. A special hardware
unit holds a platter embedded with over 5,000 highly
compressed aroma pellets. The platter spins to the
aroma key location and a laser-burst heats that spot on
the disk. The unit captures the vapours and shoots
them through a tube to the helmet.”

Smell-o-vision finally arrives. Yuck.

“Laporte calls it VaporWare. It adds a third sense to
the sight and sound of VR. Smell’s mostly ignored but
it’s a powerful sense, you know. Taste depends heavily
on smell.”

Touch is high on my list, like with that blonde over there.

John squirmed. “Touch is left to the imagination.”

Which, in my case, is pretty scary. So, how about a tour ?

“Um, okay. I’ll empty the street first so it’ll be easier
moving around. Computer, clear scene.” With the
words, the crowds and parade blinked off, like a B-

movie special effect.

Kinda spooky. So how’s it work?

“Okay, each building contains a different VR scene.
This street is the main menu. Stroll along and enter
buildings, or call up a map image and jump directly.
The place on the right is the games room, set for chess
in the cafe from Casablanca.”

I thought this was New York, 1946?

“Each room can be different. The VR interface creates
a room scene based on four characteristics defined by
the user: city, time of day, month, year. You can change
any parameter in any room. I’ve played around a bit to
test the links.”

City and year for location and era. Why month and time?

“Attention to detail. The month for correct weather
and flora. Time defines the position of the sun, or moon.
But year’s the real key. We use it to retrieve multime¬
dia clips from WorldSource to recreate the world you
see. So where to?”

Better go over the controls.

John began to explain how to manoeuvre with glove
controls and head motions. Then his voice trailed off, as
the tall, slim figure of a woman stepped out of a build¬
ing in the VR background and strolled toward them,
each step accomplished with a languid roll of her hips.

Whoa! The scenery just improved. Who’s this?

John’s stomach knotted. He swallowed. “Uh, we use
software ‘agents’ to execute certain tasks. We gave
some human form, like this one. She acts as a guide,
help desk...”

She stopped near-foreground, flipping long black hair
over the shoulder of a white pant suit. “Hello.” Her voice
was husky but feminine. “You’re not Johnny. What’s
your name?”

Uh, George Hong, Team Leader, Millennium Project.

“Voice print validation in progress.” Pause. “George
Li Hong. Employee: 5053. Status: active. Project VR
clearance: invalid.” She smiled. “Sorry, Georgie. You’re
not cleared to be in here. I’m shutting you down. Too
bad,” she added, with a little pout, “you’re kinda cute.”
The world went white.

She appears to act like a security guard as well.

“Uh, yeah. I’ll restart, give you clearance, and switch
control to you. I’ll turn her off.”

I’d rather turn her on. She looked familiar.

John didn’t answer. They spent the next hour touring
the VR city. Finally, George said he’d had enough. The
scene faded to white. John removed a sleek black visor
and helmet, blinking at the office lights. Black vines of
computer cables hung everywhere, and paper sprouted
like white fungus in every comer of the cramped office.
He watched George pull off the shiny black VR gloves.
“So what did you think?”

Flipping his ponytail over the back of the seat,
George tipped his chair back, threatening a precari¬
ously balanced pile of manuals. “So it’s incredible. I’m
blown away. This will grab the small part of the mar¬
ket PCWare doesn’t already own. You’re a bloody
genius.” He looked at John. “So why so glum?”

“Maz asked me to demo it to Laporte after New Year’s.
He wants the VR interface released with version 7.0 of
Portals.”

“And this is a bad thing? A demo for the man himself?”

John stared at his black VR gloves, his mouth dry.

“I’m no good in front of people I don’t know. Especially
an important person. I’m not good around people
period. Don’t like bars and parties. That’s why Eve and
I...” He couldn’t finish.

“Eve! That’s the babe in there! I knew she was famil¬
iar. With her hair pulled back, I didn’t...” George halted
abruptly, as John felt his face grow hot. “Uh, sorry, J.D.”

“It’s okay,” John mumbled, embarrassed. “I mean, it’s
been a year since she... we decided to split up.”

George gave a small smile. “Yeah, right.” He rear¬
ranged the VR gloves. “So why’d you pick Eve for the
VR guide?”

John fidgeted. “Um, well, we can’t use professional mod¬
els till Legal checks on royalties and stuff But we wanted
someone beautiful. And Eve is beautiful, isn’t she?”

‘Yeah, J.D., Eve is beautiful,” George said softly.

“So I used our home movies, and the multimedia link,
to create her as an agent,” John said smiling. He felt
good talking about her as his creation.

“And Eve said it’s okay?”

John hesitated. “Um, sure. I mean, it’s not like we don’t
talk. She calls me, oh, a couple times a week. Just to talk.”

George looked away. “Good. Glad you’re still friends.”

John squirmed in his chair as George went on. “She
seemed to really carry on a conversation. How’d you
manage that?”

Relieved to talk about something purely technical,
John relaxed. “We worked with psych departments, for¬
mal language groups, and AI researchers to develop an
agent-interface program, an expert system which
responds to statements and questions, based on a given
Myers-Briggs personality type.”

George blinked. “So agents not only carry on intelligent
conversation, they have their own personalities too?”

“Well, I’m not sure how intelligent it is. They respond
precisely to system commands, and to a range of ques¬
tions or statements. However, the longer the chain of
questions, or the more obscure, the more their response
will seem out of context, or,” he added, thinking of
Bogey, “like a cryptic platitude.”

George played with the black VR helmet absently.
“Sight, sound, smell. Access to WorldSource, the largest
collection of knowledge on the globe. Now, full interplay
with VR humans.”

“Not full. No touching.” He thought of Eve.

“Or taste,” George said with a grin. John grimaced.

Tuesday, January 6, 1998

Ink sketches in ebony frames stood out starkly against
eggshell walls in the executive board room. Like some
chaotic chess board, white paper pads spotted the obsid¬
ian sheen of a huge oval conference table. Black cur¬
tains covered each window, in defense against the frosty
light and falling snow.

Don Masatoshi, VP New Products, regarded John
Dunne, fidgeting in the chair beside him, hands trem¬
bling in black VR-gloves under the table. Damn. Maz
brushed white shag rug hairs from the cuffs of his char¬
coal slacks and cleared his throat. “John, in the demo,
I will do the talking. I know him better than you. You
just manipulate the glove controls.”

John’s shoulders relaxed. “Thanks, Mas-san. I...”

“Forget it. We do not pay you to be a salesman. I need

_ Douglas Smith

your skill with those.” He tapped one of John’s black gloves.

John smiled weakly then stiffened as the door flew
open and Robert Laporte, Chairman, CEO, and major¬
ity shareholder of PCWare, exploded into the room.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” he boomed. Short,
balding, and bespectacled, he projected the energy level
of a rocket on a launching pad.

A baggy white sweat shirt and black denims flapped
loosely on his lean frame, as he strode quickly to where
Maz and John sat. “Masatoshi-san, you all set? John,
isn’t it?”

John rose to shake hands but the VR wires pulled
him back. Maz groaned inwardly, but Laporte waved
John down, slapping him on the shoulder. “Okay, Maz,
so you’ll walk me through Project VR, literally. Then
we’ll talk about whether it’s part of 7.0. Which I would
hope, since you promised it for 6.0 a year ago.”

Maz started to reply, but Laporte chuckled. “I’m rib¬
bing you, Maz. Hell, we weren’t sure PCs could handle
full VR a year ago. Now the hardware’s caught up. The
VR gear too. We’ve cut unit costs to where I can give the
gear away with 7.0.” Laporte smiled as Maz raised an
eyebrow. “Hey, my goal’s market penetration, fast accep¬
tance of the VR interface. With each copy, we throw in
the helmet and gloves.” He grinned. “Assuming you
show me a product to sell.”

Maz returned the grin. “Certainly.” He motioned to
John. “John is technical leader for Project VR. I will talk
us through the demo, while John manoeuvres us
through the scenes, so I do not walk us into a sewer.”
Maz paused as Laporte chuckled. “Now, please put on
your helmet, and we will start.”

For two hours, they hid behind the smoky visors and
jet gloss of VR helmets, as Maz talked and John worked
the gloves to tour the virtual city. Bogey and
Casablanca were the hits Maz expected. “It’s like the
guy’s alive,” Laporte said.

Bogey shook his head as John declined a chess game.
“Like I said, kid, life’s black and white. You gotta pick
a side and play the game. Is that why she left you? You
wouldn’t play the game?” He extended his fists, a pawn
hidden in each. “Pick one, kid. You might win this time.”

What the hell? thought Maz. “Uh, we are running late,
and the last room contains just simple office automation.
Let’s move to questions.” They pulled off their helmets.

Laporte shook his head. “Looks fantastic.”

“So Release 7.0 will include the VR interface?” Maz
asked.

“View-ee,” Laporte corrected. “V-U-I. Like in ‘gooey’
for the soon-to-be forgotten GUI. Virtual-Reality User
Interface.”

“What happened to the ‘R’?” asked Maz.

“Verooey was not to Marketing’s taste. Plus the VUI
gives a new way to View’ computers. Nice ring to it, too.
As in cash registers.” Laporte chuckled. “Good work,
gentlemen.”

Maz grinned, thinking of the vacant post of Execu¬
tive VP of Operations. Winners and losers, he thought,
yin and yang.

Wednesday, January 7, 1998

Bits and Bytes, PCWare Internal Newsletter: ‘Yester¬
day I approved our Virtual-reality User Interface, the

February 1998

New Year’s Eve _

VUI (that’s View-ee), for Portals 7.0, scheduled for retail
March 2,1998. We’ll hold demos for staff over the next
month. On a related note, we’ve promoted John Dunne,
Project VR Leader, to Manager, Quality Assurance.
Congratulations, John! - Robert Laporte.”

Monday, January 26, 1998

Snow opaqued the bottom of the palace windows, split¬
ting each pane into white frost and inky night. Moving
among the revellers, John sipped white nectar from an
obsidian goblet, which tasted exactly like the milk in
his black Batman mug.

He was working late, testing the VUI’s date interface
with Portals 7.0. A millennium’s eve party gave him a
fun way to verify the system year would flip to 2000
after December 31, 1999. It also let him be with Eve,
alone in the office.

“Eve, set date, 1999-12-31. Set time, 11:30pm.”

She stepped from the crowd in a long sable gown.
“Another New Year’s Eve, Johnny? I would’ve thought
the last one was enough for you.” She looked around.
“Or have you programmed out the exits, so I can’t walk
out this time?”

His face grew hot. “Please acknowledge the date
change.”

She shrugged. “Acknowledged.”

John watched as the hands on a nearby grandfather
clock whirled to 11:30. He swallowed. “Would you like
to dance?”

“Nope. Would you like to come upstairs?”

“What? What do you mean?”

She smiled. “What do you think?” She began a slow
climb of the curving staircase. Her long pale legs split
the folds of her black gown with every step. With shak¬
ing fingers, John worked the gloves to follow her up
wi nding stairs and through a maze of white carpeted
halls until finally she turned into a room ahead of him.
Reaching it, he stopped in the doorway.

She stood with a foot on a bed canopied in black silk,
exposing the length of her leg. Reaching under a raven
cascade of hair, she undid her gown, letting it fall to her
hips. Her breasts were bare, nipples painted black. As
she moved her foot from the bed, the gown fell to the
floor, over black panties, garter belt and stockings, stark
against white skin.

“Eve,” he croaked.

Her smile held neither warmth nor invitation.
“What’s the matter, Johnny? Why don’t you come and
hold me?” She kicked off black high heels, and flowed
onto the white sheets of the bed. Arching her back, she
very slowly pulled her panties down to her thighs. Slip¬
ping them off, she lay back, legs spread. “Still over
there?” she mocked. ‘You’re about as good in a VR bed¬
room as you were in our real one.”

His eyes burned but he couldn’t tear them from her.

“Guess I’ll just have to do it myself.” Smiling, she
moved a hand to between her legs. Somewhere a clock
chimed midnight.

He continued to watch, until his own orgasm hit him,
like in a wet dream. Taken by surprise, his spasms tore
the wires from one glove, dropping the link. Ripping off
the visor, he sat sobbing in the chair for several min¬
utes, then stumbled to the washroom in the empty

office. After, he put his parka on, and headed home in
the swirling whiteness of a night storm.

Monday, March 2, 1998

Wall Street Journal: “PCWare Inc. has released version
7.0 of Portals, their popular operating system for per¬
sonal computers, incorporating the world’s first Virtual
Reality User Interface, or VUI (‘View-ee’). PCWare’s
founder, Robert Laporte, stated that he expects the VUI
to completely replace the GUI point-and-click interface
common to most PCs. PCWare’s bundling of the VUI and
VR gear at no cost into version 7.0 drew charges of unfair
competition practices from a group of other software
vendors, since only PCWare’s VaporWare technology
and WorldSource multimedia interface with the VUI.”

John leaned back in his chair, as he finished reading
the article to George. “Think he’ll get away with it again?”

George snorted. “Does Mickey Mouse have ears?”

“Pretty soon,” mused John, “you won’t need a mouse.”

George grimaced. “Pretty soon, you won’t need a
world.” Pointing a hand in a black VR glove at John, he
made a trigger pulling motion. “Zap! Reality is gone.
Virtuality is all. Dial me a year, click me a place, and
program me a life.”

John thought of Eve, but said nothing.

Monday, November 30, 1998

New York Times: “Early Q4 sales have far exceeded
forecasts for PCWare’s Portals 7.0. Analysts estimate
that 95% of PCs in the world will use 7.0 by Q2 1999.
The growth is credited to a rapid and rabid adoption of
the VUI and the astute decision by PCWare to provide
the requisite VR equipment with Portals 7.0.”

Thursday, December 31, 1998

Head bowed, John’s tears dropped onto his visor, dis¬
torting the image of Eve in a black leather skirt, smoky
stockings, and loose white blouse. Through the streaks,
her black lipstick smile writhed like an adder across her
face. She turned away.

‘You can’t do this to me again, Eve!” he cried.

“End of the old, start of the new. Time for a change.”

“Don’t leave. Not on New Year’s Eve again. I’ve
changed.”

She looked back at him. “No, you haven’t, Johnny.
You’re still the same boring little loser, a zero. You made
me so much like the real Eve that I feel the same way
about you.”

‘You are the real Eve,” he blubbered. “I love you.”

She shook her head. “The choice is always black and
white to me, but you always choose wrong.” She walked
away.

He reached for her, not with the glove controls, but
with his arms. Leaning forward in his office chair, he
toppled to the floor, ripping wires from the helmet and
gloves, cutting the VUI connection. His head cracked
against a table leg.

He awoke, George and Maz kneeling over him.
George helped him into a chair. “Shit, J.D., what hap¬
pened? You okay?”

“Eve,” he murmured. “She must still be in the building.”

“What’re you saying? Eve moved to Vancouver a year ago.”
“Can’t let her leave me again. Black or white. Gotta
choose right this time, black or white.” He looked up at
them.

Maz stared at him for a breath, then turned to
George, shaking his head. “Take him home.”

George sighed. “Stay put. I’ll get your coat.”

John stared out the window at pearly flakes falling
against the soot of the night sky. “Black or white,” he
whispered.

tvm'j

Friday, January 29, 1999

Bits and Bytes, PCWare Internal Newsletter: “John
Dunne, Project VR team leader, and more recently our
QA Manager, is taking a well deserved paid LOA, in
recognition of his role in 7.0’s success. Thanks John!
Enjoy your break! During John’s absence, George Hong
will act as interim QA Manager.”

KrflrirfcM

Monday, September 20, 1999

Los Angeles Times, Fast Forward column: “Industry
analysts estimate the world will have 270 million PC’s
at the turn of the century. With PCWare’s Portals 7.0
holding an estimated 95% market share, more than a
quarter of a billion people will be plugged into the now
ubiquitous VUI by Year 2000.”

Friday, December 17,1999

Maz eased back into the black leather of the corner
booth of Flanagan’s dimly lit bar, feeling the warmth
from his third scotch. “So what can the new Executive
VP of Operations do for his favourite propeller head?”

George Hong sat slumped in the opposite seat, look¬
ing like his puppy had died. “Mas-san, you know about
Year 2000 date issues, right? Remember a PCWare pro¬
ject called Millennium?”

The older man nodded. “1994. We scanned for year
2000 problems in Portals. Two-digit year fields and cal¬
culations. Millennium produced fixes for release 5.2
which hit retail, let’s see, November 95. What about it?”

“You remember a PCWare employee named Ed
Lochs? Tall, skinny, balding? You turfed him just before
the 7.0 release.”

Maz frowned. ‘Yes. Serious performance problems. So?”
The techie sighed. “One of my people was surfing
some UK web sites. She kept hearing this buzz about
a bug in Portals.”

Maz felt a tightness in his throat. “And?”

“She traced an E-mail chain back to Ed Lochs. He’s on
contract for some software apps firm in Dublin. I got wor¬
ried and checked into what we had him on before he left.
His last assignment was Project VR, coding the interface
between the VUI and the Millennium date fixes. He added
a patch in late ’97.1 had one of my people look at it.”

Maz stared at him. George sighed and continued. ‘We
found a Millennium bug in the VUI date link.”

Maz shook his head. “The 5.2 Millennium date rou¬
tines have been on the market for four years. A 5.2 bug
would have shown by now, in calculations projecting
past 1999. We never touched 5.2 date code after the fix.
When we designed 7.0, we simply called the 5.2 rou-

February 1998

_ Douglas Smith

tines, because we knew they were clean.”

George nodded. ‘Yeah, but 7.0 included the VUI. The
first thing the VUI does is call a 7.0 module called ‘Sce-
neSet,’ to get the system date. SceneSet then links to
WorldSource to set the VR scenario, pulling back¬
grounds, agent costumes, era detail, etc., all based on
the year in the system date.”

“Which should be correct from 5.2 fixes,” Maz repeated.

George sighed. “Version 5.2 changed the system date
to a four-digit year all right, but thanks to Lochs, now
Sceneset in 7.0 only picks up the last two digits. Once
2000 hits, the VUI will think it’s 1900, and show all
rooms as from that era.”

“That’s it? What about date displays, prints, calcs?”

George shook his head, black ponytail falling down his
white T-shirt. “All okay. It’s just the VUI scene setter.”

Maz snorted. “Big deal. Embarrassing, but the VUI
will work. Once the system starts, the user can override
to 2000.”

‘Nope. The scene setter won’t accept a future date, since
it can’t link to WorldSource for a year which it thinks
hasn’t occurred yet. And the VUI will think it’s 1900.”

Maz groaned. “So it will be stuck in 1900 forever?”

“Until the real year flips to 2001, when you’ll have
the much larger choice of 1900 or 1901,” George replied.
“Plus, most users have by now customized their own VR
rooms from different years. Any room later than 1900
will cause an error, defaulting back to 1900 scenes, piss¬
ing off a lot of people.”

“Only 250 million. You sure of this?”

“Shit, yes. I worked through the night on it, then had
my staff run through it again today. Sorry, Maz. It’s real.”

Maz looked at George for a long while. He thought of
his promotion, his chalet in the Muskokas, his black
Porsche Carrera with the white leather seats.

“Black and white, too,” George mused.

“What?” said Maz startled.

“WorldSource photographs and movie reconstructs for
1900 are black and white. It’ll all be black and white.”

Mrumii

Thursday, December 30, 1999

New York Times, High Tech page: “PCWare CEO
Robert Laporte has terminated the contract of Donald
Masatoshi, Executive VP, Operations. Laporte held
Masatoshi principally responsible for the ‘Millennium’
bug in the Portals 7.0 operating system, installed on
virtually every personal computer in the world. PCWare
also fired a software engineer over the incident.”

liikbi

New Year’s Eve, 1999

Maz moved through the kata with the fluidity and
grace of a dancer, the sleeves of his white gi snapping
with each punch and block, his black belt whipping
with each hip turn. The doorbell rang as he stepped
into the final moves. His shouted “Come” substituted
for the kiai on the last shuto, as he pulled up to the for¬
mal ending and bowed to invisible judges.

“Mas-san,” a voice said quietly behind him.

Maz turned to face George Hong, standing at the
door to the dojo room, black motorcycle jacket over a
cream cotton T-shirt. George bowed and entered, toss¬
ing a thick white towel to Maz.

^5

New Year’s Eve

Maz wiped his face. “You saw him?”

‘Yeah, for all the good it did. Told him Laporte
canned him along with you, but I’m not sure he under¬
stood.” George shook his head. “John’s lost it, Maz.
Thanked me for dropping in and said he was late for a
very important date.”

“The white rabbit?”

George didn’t smile. “With Eve, in VR. He just turned
his back on me, slipped on that damn black helmet, and
tuned me out. I kept talking, but he ignored me. I let
myself out.”

‘“The sword and Zen are one’,” Maz murmured, step¬
ping through another kata. “Martial arts and Zen agree
on many points. Both forbid attachment to things. No
matter how many techniques the karateka masters, if his
mind becomes attached to techniques, he cannot win.”
Maz finished and looked at George. “The mind must not
become fixed. Our John has become fixed, lost by attach¬
ing to a memory.” He pointed to the white bundle of
papers under George’s arm. “What do you have there?”

“Another problem.”

Maz sighed. “Do you know what the Greeks did to
messengers such as you? Come into the sun room.” He
led George down a black-tiled hall to a glassed room at
the back of the sprawling bungalow. They settled into
white wicker chairs.

Squinting against the snow outside, George slipped
on black RayBans. “Been doing some research on the
Net. Medical web sites, chats with clinics, psychologists,
universities.”

“About what?”

“War of the Worlds broadcast, Nazi propaganda
mechanisms. Mass psychoses, large scale hallucina¬
tions.” He pulled papers from his pile, plopping them
on the table as he spoke. “Mass media campaigns, sub¬
liminal advertising, AI. And, new studies on long-term
exposure to sophisticated VR, like 7.0.”

Maz rubbed his temples, feeling his fatigue. “My
friend, I’ve had better weeks, so if you have a point...”

George leaned forward, slipping the sun glasses to the
end of his short nose. “Two hundred and fifty million peo¬
ple.” Maz blinked. George went on. “Two hundred and
fifty million VR users, thanks to the VUI and World-
Source and VaporWare and Laporte giving away VR sets.
All seeing an exact copy of a wrong reality, thanks to the
VUI bug. Tomorrow, a quarter of a billion VR users will
slip on those damned black helmets and into a 1900
world, a world accurate to the minutest detail.”

“What are you driving at?”

George tapped the top paper. “Stanford, May 1997:
Doctors exposed subjects to a range of everyday scenar¬
ios, some in real life, some in VR. As exposure to VR grew,
subjects experienced increasing difficulty reconstructing
whether events occurred in reality or in VR. The same
experiment was repeated with more scenarios and a
larger test group at the University of Toronto in 98, and
this year at McGill in Montreal.” George leaned forward
again. “The McGill study had 500 subjects. Similar
effects, but with a kicker: staff controlling the tests
experienced the same distorted perception of reality.”

“Leading you to believe what?”

George took a breath. “I think that 250 million VR-
users all seeing the same distorted view of reality at
once could affect... reality. I think that on New Year’s

36

Day reality could change to what a quarter of a billion
users see in VR.”

Maz stared at the programmer, then threw back his
head, roaring with laughter as George reddened. “So
tomorrow we wake up to 1900 outside? Is that it? We
ride in carriages and wear those funny hats? Oh,
George, thank you. My problems now seem so small.”
Maz rose and still chuckling went to a black enamelled
cabinet, white dragons on each door. “Scotch?”

George stared at the snow hitting the dark asphalt
of Maz’s curving driveway. ‘Yeah, sure.” He muttered
something else.

Maz handed him a glass. “What did you say?”

“A quarter of a billion people,” George said quietly.

WtliMdi

New Year’s Day

On the first day of the new Millennium, John Dunne
rose early, donned his black VR helmet and gloves, and
settled down in front of his computer. Shortly before
noon, he removed the helmet, placing it on his lap. He
sat for another half hour, black-gloved hand tapping on
his white terry robe. Finally he rose, and dressed slowly.
Donning a white ski jacket and black toque, he stepped
onto the street. Black of city dirt mixed with the white
of new snow to cover all with a wet grey smear.

Cabs sped by, ignoring his hail. Buying a paper, he
began to walk and read. An article on the new space
shuttle program caught his eye, along with a promotion
announcement at PCWare.

A clip-clop sound caused him to turn. Still no taxis,
but a horse-drawn trolley approached. He hailed it. Pat¬
ting the glossy black rump of the closest horse, he
pulled his Macintosh aside and climbed into the car,
placing his top hat on the seat beside him. Turning
back to his paper, he read that F.W. Woolworth, pro¬
jecting revenues of $5 million, had opened his 59th
store. He scanned an article on McKinley’s “full dinner
pail” re-election campaign, and an editorial on the
Democratic ticket of William Jennings Bryan and Adlai
Stevenson.

The driver signalled his stop, and John stepped down
to find her waiting. Mud speckled the ruffle at the foot
of her long black dress. She leaned demurely on a white
parasol, which had been open to protect her bonnet
from the snow.

“Eve,” he said smiling. He pulled her close, thrilling
to her body against his, the taste of her lips.

“You’re late,” she teased but with warmth.

“Many years late, I fear.”

“No matter,” she replied. They walked into the park,
her white gloved hand resting lightly on the black of his
sleeve.

“I think,” he said, “it will be a happy new year.”

She smiled but didn’t answer.

Douglas Smith is a new Canadian writer who lives in Unionville,
a small suburb of Toronto, where he works as head of technology
for an international consulting firm. His other short-story credits
include sales to the annual Canadian anthology, Tesseracts 6
(December 1997), and to Dark Horizons (UK, forthcoming in 1998).

Keith Brooke

"Thu ask again, about the sounds you heard today,”
V said the guide. The group was preparing to spend
_L the night in a traditional cane and skin summer
lodge but now every face was turned towards the young
man. He, in turn, studied the nine westerners, in their
Goretex and denim, their glossy leather hiking boots
with the multicoloured laces. “Come,” he said, “and I will
tell you about a time when your predecessors were new
to this land. I will tell you about a young man, to whom
I am distantly related, and about his dead sister...”

Henza gazed blankly at the face of his dead sister. It
was the seventh day of his vigil.

It was almost as if he was gazing at his own reflec¬
tion in still water, for he was aware that he shared with
Gilgeth a feminine cast of the features that marked him
as different from the other mountain-hardened men of
the village. Their faces were ravaged and reddened by
exposure to the wind and the cold whereas he, a
teacher, only worked out of doors at the busiest of times.

Henza sniffed the air, and was satisfied that the
sweet odour betrayed no signs of the onset of decay. He
muttered prayers to the mountain spirits and to his
ancestors, just to be sure. Gilgeth’s corpse must stay
fresh for twelve more days at the least, he estimated.
If they burned her too soon they might also burn her
spirit and then she would be irrevocably lost for eter¬
nity. If, however, they left her too long and the rot was
allowed to set in, then the Taker of Souls might rean¬
imate Gilgeth’s remains and use her to his own vile
ends. It was a fine balance to strike, but it was so
important to his people’s beliefs that Henza had never
known the process to be carried out incorrectly. During
the past seven days he had barely slept, so gravely did
he take his responsibility.

He stood and left the Lodge of Mourning.

The Lodge was a low building, carved partly into the
mountain-side and built up to its shoulder-high eaves

with blocks of stone cut so finely that they needed no mor¬
tar to bind them together. Apart from the prayer flags
that flew from the roof, the building blended well with its
bare surroundings, so that only one who knew of its pres¬
ence would be able to detect it from any distance.

Rookah, the people’s Sayer, had already visited at
dawn, and he would come again at dusk, but that left
Henza plenty of time for what he needed to do. He set
off, across the slope of the valley in which the Lodge lay.
In a short time he was at the gaping mouth of a larger
valley, scrambling up over the moss-coated rubble that
formed the great glacier’s terminal moraine.

When Henza reached the ice-face, he paused to
recover his breath. Below him, a ragged band of choughs
had returned to the moraine, chattering and tumbling
as they rose and settled, rose and settled. It was clear
today, and all around him the mountains shrugged
mightily skywards. Henza knew that many would
regard such a view with something approaching awe,
but he felt none of that: the mountains were his master,
neither enemy nor friend. They were simply there.

Rested, he set out along the ice-face, until he found
the site of his previous workings. He drew a hammer
and chisel from his belt and started to hack a groove
into the ice, pausing frequently, for he found such work
exhausting. Eventually he had freed a block as tall as
himself, and as broad as he was at the shoulders. Other
men, he knew, could carve a bigger block in less time,
but it was Henza’s sister in the Lodge below and he was
determined to perform the required duties himself.
When Gilgeth’s time was called by Rookah, she would
be as fresh as on the day the fever had taken her.
Henza’s ice and his prayers, and the dried petals he
scattered over her, would see to that.

After another rest, he carved a groove into the block
of ice and secured a rope around it. With a heave, he
toppled the block, and then he worked his way between
it and the glacier and forced it free with the strength

February 1998

Resting Place _

of his legs. It took him some time to work the block of
ice down over the moraine, even though he had selected
this site for the ease of its passage. Once on the valley
floor, the going was easier, but it still took Henza the
rest of the afternoon to drag his ice down to the Lodge.

Rookah was waiting, impatient.

“She is all right?” asked Henza, suddenly concerned.

“She is,” snapped the Sayer. Then he seized Henza by
the scruff of his yak’s wool jacket and hauled him inside
the Lodge. “But feel the temperature!” he hissed. “You
want her to rot before her soul is released? You care so
little?”

Henza felt warm, but then he had been working on
his block of ice all afternoon. His face, too, flushed hotly
with shame and resentment - what right had Rookah
to doubt his devotion to the fate of Gilgeth’s soul? “I
have more ice,” he gasped.

“That? Kaliq brought twice as much for his father.
You should be ashamed.” Kaliq’s father had lain in the
Lodge for 46 days before his time was called and his
body burnt. But Kaliq’s father had died at the end of
the previous winter, with the glacier far closer to the
Lodge than it currently lay.

Henza said nothing.

He bowed his head and begged tolerance and then,
when Rookah had departed, Henza said the prayers
that the Sayer had forgotten, in his anger, to say.

Gilgeth’s time was called, 26 days into her Passage into
Grace.

When the 16th day had passed, Henza knew that,
despite all Rookah’s criticisms, he had done well. By the
time Rookah emerged from the Lodge on that 26th day,
Henza even thought it possible that he could detect a
hint of respect in the old Sayer’s countenance.

“It is time,” said Rookah, in the prescribed form. “The
Soul is free of its physical entrapments. After the cold
of ice we must use fire to guard your sister’s liberty
from the bounds of evil.”

When Henza entered the Lodge again, he saw that
Rookah had moved his sister’s corpse onto the litter
Henza had lovingly crafted from bamboo and goat-skin.
Her body had been bound tightly in more skins, so that
only her eyes were visible. He stared at her and she, in
turn, stared back. He looked around at the candles and
the baskets of dried petals, preserved from the spring.
He took the handles of Gilgeth’s litter and started the
long descent towards the village.

It was a morning typical of the end of summer. Mist
swimming in the dark valleys, the sun splashing gold
across the jagged peaks. By the track a scattering of
late potentillas and gentians made their last desperate
attempts at procreation.

By the time he had reached the village, he was below
the level of the clouds and the peaks were hidden. Nor¬
mally the men would be out on the slopes, rounding up
the herds for the winter, and the women would be cook¬
ing and preserving the crops and meat. But today,
Rookah had spread word of Henza and Gilgeth’s
descent and so all work had been suspended. Already,
the fire smouldered, a long, sunken bed of charcoal that
had been brought up from the foothills. The cremation
rack was laid out by the pyre, its blackened metal grid
overlaid with petals and herbs arranged with meticu-

38

lous precision.

At Rookah’s signal two men came forward and took
Gilgeth so that she could be placed on the rack. As a
gaggle of old women gathered round to ensure the cor¬
rect arrangement of his sister, Henza sank to his knees,
and allowed himself to drink from a ladle of soup one
of his boys offered him. He was their teacher and they,
at least, respected him.

Later, accompanied by Rookah, he examined Gilgeth
where she lay. They had prepared her beautifully -
bound in place with twisted silk scarves, wrapped in
fresh furs and smothered in more dried petals. Henza
was pleased. He nodded and the same two men raised
her on the rack and placed her over the burning coals.

It was not long before the smell of her cooking meat
reached his nose. Sickened, he felt the juices in his stom¬
ach multiplying. He chewed on a hard crust of bread,
and drank deeply anything that was offered to him.

The day passed by in a blur of faces, all saying the
appropriate things. Gilgeth’s smell transformed itself
as the day grew old, until it was indistinguishable from
ordinary smoke.

Around Henza, people danced and laughed, and
eventually he passed out and someone must have been
good enough to haul him back to his own summer lodge,
because that was where he found himself the following
dawn, as new sunlight found its way in through the
familiar gaps in the skins.

He sat, and waited for his spinning senses to settle.
And then he saw the neat pile of blackened bones on
the floor. He reached out and touched them. Still warm:
close to body temperature, he realized.

Out fetching water, later in the morning, he received
the first of the barbed comments.

“Have you taken her up yet, eh?” The old woman
snickered, then turned back to her friend.

“I have to finish the carving,” Henza muttered, know'-
ing that he could not reasonably be expected yet to have
taken Gilgeth’s bones up the rough slopes of the next
mountain and deposited them in the Resting Place.

A few days later he realized why he was being treated
like this. Some of the villagers had always displayed a
sense of resentment towards him. He had been away,
and received an education, and then come back to his
people as a teacher. He knew what others did not and
so, in some undefined sense, he was seen as a threat.

But there was more to it than that. The source of this
current attitude towards him was older than the jeal¬
ousies he knew so well.

As a boy he had been struck down by the same fever
that had so recently taken Gilgeth. He had lain uncon¬
scious and hotter than burning charcoal for 20 days
before his father had plucked up the courage to act.
Under cover of darkness - for otherwise he would have
been prevented - his father had slung Henza across his
shoulders and set out down the mountain. He had
marched for five days until he reached a settlement of
the rich men from the west. Somehow he had managed
to pay them to heal his son with their exotic medicines
and Henza had made a rapid recovery.

On returning to the village, however, the two were
not welcomed as they had expected. The people were
angry that Henza’s father had not consulted them
before acting so rashly. They had already started the

interione

Keith Brooke

rites in preparation for Henza’s Laying in Grace. The
Guardian of the Resting Place would have been alerted
by this and would be expecting the deposition of the
boy’s freshly burned and carved bones.

Now, Henza was surprised to realize that resentment
for his father’s acts still lingered after all this time.
These people, who were his neighbours and friends,
were willing his Fate to catch him up! For they all
believed that if he was brave enough to take Gilgeth’s
bones up to the Resting Place, the Guardian would
never let him escape for a second time.

When he realized this, Henza began to suspect that on
some level he, too, had feared what Fate might hold in
store for him. But, unlike the older people of this village,
he was an educated man! He would have none of this.

He saw no reason why he should feel intimidated by
the crude superstitions of his neighbours. That night
he completed the carving of his sister’s blackened bones:
the lines of her personal prayer, the names of her ances¬
tors, the ancient symbols of the gods. In the morning,
he set out.

The village was little more than a haphazard cluster
of summer lodges gathered around a larger stone winter
lodge. In the winter, a group of men would take the herds
of sheep and goats, and the village’s half-dozen yaks down
to the foothills and in the spring they would return with
the livestock and with the maize and rice and tools they
had traded for meat and skins. The winter lodge held
storage space for the village’s provisions and winter quar¬
ters for all who did not follow the herds down-valley.

The village was situated on a shelf part way up the
slope of a gorge. Henza, with his sister’s bones tucked
into a specially embroidered sack over his shoulder,
took the precarious track down into the gorge, passing
through denser and denser vegetation, and finally pass¬
ing through the tongue of birchwood which lapped up
the valley bottom. Here, he heard the calls of monals
and laughing thrushes, yet to migrate to a lower alti¬
tude for the approaching winter.

Henza felt curiously at peace. He no longer believed
the myths of his people, yet his love for his sister was
stronger than anything else. Gilgeth had believed: he
was making this trek for her.

He climbed the opposing slope, the track less well
defined here. Birch and a few rhododendrons thinned
to grasses and the dying vegetation of mountain flow¬
ers, so profuse in the spring. Moss and lichen gave way
to bare rock and soon Henza’s village was lost to his
view as he worked across and up a ridge, avoiding the
vicious screes which were liable to cascade downwards
at the slightest disturbance. Around him, pressing
close, white-capped mountains bit great chunks out of
the thin blue sky.

Henza had never taken this path before, yet its
course was etched into his mind as surely as Gilgeth’s
prayer was inscribed on her two charred femurs and
the icons of her ancestors were limned onto the inner
surface of her skull. Approaching the snow line, he rec¬
ognized the two black crags, their stone flecked with
quartz like the crystallized tears of the mountain itself.

He passed between them, then followed a fault across
the ice which should never have existed, yet its per¬
manence was made legendary in stories passed down
across the generations.

Finally, he came to an opening which he sensed before
it became visible. The ice and snow opened up to form
an enormous bowl centred on a single rocky outcrop. At
the base of this outcrop a dark hole yawned and at the
entrance to this cave a hunched figure stood guard.

Immediately, Henza’s disbelief was shattered as frag¬
ments of childhood nightmares flooded his senses. He
crouched down on the ice, until he realized that he was
in the open with no real place to hide.

Then he remembered that he was carrying Gilgeth’s
bones.

It was said, in the legends, that in exchange for a
sack of bones the Guardian must allow the bearer free
passage. Would this apply to one who had already
cheated the Guardian of his own bones, Henza won¬
dered? He found it difficult to believe that he, an edu¬
cated man, was thinking in such terms. They were only
stories, he told himself.

But still, he did not move.

Eventually, he straightened. His love of his sister was
stronger than all else. He followed a rough track down
the ice until his feet were on solid rock again. He
approached the Guardian and now he could judge its
size more accurately: the thing was so big that if it
stood directly in the cave’s entrance no light would pass
inside, he felt sure.

The creature of legend was still.

Henza approached it, curiosity overriding his earlier
caution, and then he laughed. This “Guardian” was
merely an effigy, carved out of stone. A pagan effigy for
a primitive people. Had there ever been a real
Guardian, too, he wondered? Or was this statue all
there ever was?

He entered the cave and was instantly struck by the
serene atmosphere of its interior. He followed its course,
until the entrance was lost behind him. After a short
time he came upon a chamber, lit with some eerie lumi¬
nescence which glittered wetly from the walls. Stacked
in neat array, on inset shelves and in orderly heaps on
the floor, were countless embroidered sacks, holding the
dead of Henza’s village and those others that used this
Resting Place.

Finally, Gilgeth’s loss seemed tangible to Henza. He
realized that until now his grieving had been diverted by
the strict requirements of the funerary rites. Now Henza
knew that his sister was gone from his life forever.

He found the correct place and put the bones above
the sacks that held Kaliq’s father, Ghan’s wife, Lukhar’s
father. He rubbed angrily at the tears on his cheeks. He
left the cave and sat for a time in the icebound arena,
glancing occasionally at the stony Guardian. By rights
the Guardian should have taken him when he was a
boy, and for once he felt an attachment to the beliefs
which had caused the village to promise him to the
Resting Place before he was even dead. But also, by
those very beliefs, the Guardian could not take him
today, as Henza had come here with bones to deposit
and must therefore be left free to return to his village.

He stood, aware that his whole view of the world had
been fractured by the death of his beloved sister. And
then he returned across the ice and snow, across the
rocks, down to the gorge and, finally, back up the oppo¬
site side to his people.

February 1998

Resting Place

In the mountains there are only three seasons. Spring
is a time of profusion and colour, when whole swathes
of slope are transformed by cloaks of green and blue
and white. Summer comes when the spring rains have
passed and the vegetation has dried up and died.

That year winter came with a rush, or so it seemed
to Henza, for he had spent so long in isolation with his
departing sister that he had missed the annual prepa¬
rations made by the villagers. By the time he had
deposited Gilgeth’s bones, the men were almost ready
to drive the herds down valley for the winter.

As usual, Henza spent the cold season cooped up in
the winter lodge with the women, children and old folk.
He was the teacher, he could not leave his pupils. And
it was generally accepted that he would be of little use
with the livestock.

For most of the season few people ventured outdoors.
They had little reason to, for all that they needed was con¬
tained within the walls of the Lodge, and each opening of
a door served only to let more of the warmth escape.

When he sensed the worst had passed, Henza began
to explore outside again. It was his favourite time of the
year, yet one that he feared too. He loved it for the flow¬
ers which could sometimes be almost in full bloom in
the pockets of air they melted into the snow with their
own warmth. He loved it for the rhododendrons, always
the first shrubs to bloom down in the birchwood. He
feared it, because it had been the flash-flood from a
sharp thaw that had swept his parents and several oth¬
ers to their deaths, their bodies never to be found and
correctly mourned. Punishment, people had whispered,
for his father’s rashness, although they never said this
to Henza himself.

Soon, the men were back with their animals and the
goods they had exchanged for meat and skins. After the
winter fare of hard-baked breads and salted meat there
was suddenly rice and maize and green vegetables. It
was a time of celebrations, a time of reunions and, as
always, Henza felt apart from his neighbours. He recon¬
structed his summer lodge, with poles and skins stored
under the eaves of the winter lodge. He took his pupils
on long walks, teaching them the names and uses of
plants, something their grandparents should have
taught them long ago, and would have done if the vil¬
lage had no teacher.

With the spring came the travellers.

First, there came a wandering holy man who had a
clever way with story-telling and was made welcome for
several days. Then there came small parties of itinerant
tradesmen, and parties of young people offering their
labour for the season, some of whom were taken on.

But it was a caravan of entertainers that proved to
be Henza’s downfall.

The first sign of their approach was the music, float¬
ing up on a spring mist. Sound carries a long way in the
mountains, and Henza knew that they were still some
distance away, but still, for some reason, he awaited
their arrival with a keen anticipation.

They arrived late in the day and immediately set up
camp on a slope next to the main cluster of the village.
From the entrance to his lodge, Henza watched these
strangers erecting their elaborate tents in an orderly cir¬
cle. In a very short time they had their camp established,
with a huge fire roaring and already there was a steady

40

influx of villagers making their first inspections.

Soon, Henza joined the flow and before long he stood
in a knot of people, laughing and cheering as a con¬
tortionist bent over backwards until her head stared
out at them from between her knees and then she
began to dance, her crooked gait echoing that of a raven
caught in a sudden updraft.

Henza soon found that he was enjoying himself. He
knew that a price had already been negotiated between
the leaders of this circus and his own village. He was
determined to get some value from the deal. He drank
with men who had actually been as far as the sea, and
travelled on the westerners’ great boats. He watched a
man who could put out a flame with his mouth, and
another who drove long skewers through his cheeks
and his eyelids and even through the centre of his neck.
Later, this man inserted hooks into his abdomen and
prepared to suspend himself from a wooden frame, but
Henza chose not to stay and watch.

Instead, he joined another crowd and worked his way
steadily to the front.

He saw the shrouded form of a woman, and then,
beyond her, a man playing a stringed instrument which
was slung across his chest.

After a few seconds, Henza recognized the tune as
one his mother had sung when he was little. And then,
as the woman turned, he stared at her and in the way
she looked back at him and in the way she held her
body he saw his dead sister, Gilgeth.

She moved, starting to dance, and the image dis¬
torted, as if a ripple had crossed Henza’s vision, and
from this new angle he saw that her face was thinner,
with harder lines, her hair straighten

It was not his sister.

Then she turned again, and it was.

Henza stayed and watched for the rest of the evening,
as the crowd around him changed. By the end, he was
certain that it was not Gilgeth, somehow reincarnated,
and then, as she bowed in exit, she looked at him and
it was the look in her eyes that pulled the mountain
from beneath his feet.

When he stood again she had gone.

He turned to Ghan, the old man who had caught him
as his legs gave way. “You saw her?” he said. “The
dancer. Was it...?”

Ghan looked at him, smiled sympathetically, then
turned away.

Henza seized the arm of another, but he did not know
what to say. He made a hurried tour of the encamp¬
ment, hoping to glimpse the dancer, but had no luck.

That night, Henza could not sleep, and the following
morning, instead of going to the winter lodge to teach
his children, he returned to the entertainers’ settle¬
ment. He asked questions of every villager he saw, but
they had not seen the dancer, or if they had they had
seen no resemblance.

He asked the entertainers about the woman who had
been dancing, but they would only point out that there
had been many women dancing last night, no?

Finally, he recognized the man who had been accom¬
panying her, with his playing and his singing.

“Hey!” cried Henza. “Can we speak? Hey!”

The man disappeared into a summer lodge. Henza
hesitated, then plunged in after him.

interxone

Keith Brooke

A jabber of voices fell suddenly silent, and four men
stared at Henza, who began to apologize. “I’m sorry” he
said quickly. “I did not intend... I only... I wanted to ask
about a woman who danced here last night.” Half of the
lodge was screened off, and beyond he sensed that there
were more people, listening. “I recognized you,” he con¬
tinued, gesturing at the man he had followed.

One of the other men was standing before him now.
“You wanted to ask about a woman?” he said, and
Henza nodded eagerly. He started to speak but stopped
when two of the men seized his arms. The one who had
already spoken leaned towards Henza and sniffed at
him, like a dog finding an old bone. “We do not provide
that kind of entertainment,” he said, and made a brief
gesture with one hand.

And then, as he was dragged from the lodge, Henza
saw the dancer peering out at him from behind the
screen, covering her mouth with one delicate hand. He
started to speak but then she was gone and he was out¬
side the lodge picking himself up from the ground.

That night he searched the encampment with
increasing desperation, but when he finally found the
musician he was accompanying an illusionist and there
was no sign of the woman who reminded Henza so
strongly of his sister.

The following morning the entertainers had moved
out before he was awake.

He returned to his teaching and his quiet life in the vil¬
lage, living on the fringe and hoping not to be noticed.
In time, he felt sure, he would learn to accept the loss
of his sister.

He managed remarkably well, or at least, that was
how it must have appeared to any observer. But at night,
alone in his lodge, sleep evaded him; when it came his
dreams were filled with Gilgeth, dancing for him, run¬
ning from him, hiding in a deep cave up above the ice.

Finally, he could take no more. In a small bag he
packed what he would need, and before dawn his vil¬
lage was far behind him, and above him. The steepness
of the mountains here meant that in a night and a day
he had passed from above the tree-line, down through
birch and juniper woods, through maple and pine to the
deep forests of the sal tree. He reached the next village
by the middle of the following morning, stiff and aching
from his few hours’ broken sleep on the forest floor.

He accepted the hospitality of the new village grate¬
fully, and when he asked about the travelling enter¬
tainers he learned that they had passed this way only
15 days before. He travelled onwards that afternoon,
aware that the travellers would move more slowly than
him and that they stayed two or three days at a time
when they made camp. He would be with them in a
matter of days!

When he did catch up with them, six days later, he
suddenly realized that he had no plan of action.

Cautiously, he entered the village where they had set
up camp, but he was just another stranger and so he
went unnoticed.

That evening he glimpsed her again, but she did not
perform. The following morning, he approached one of
the entertainers, hoping not to be recognized. “I want
to join you,” he said.

The man looked at him, barked a short laugh and

asked, “Well, what do you do? You dance like a mon¬
key?” The man hung his arms low and made simian
noises deep in his chest.

“I can help you pack and unpack. I can clean. I can
learn. I can teach.”

The man looked at him again, then waved a hand in
dismissal and turned away.

At the next village, Henza approached the man once
again. “I want to join you,” he said. This time the man
shrugged and said, “Help me with this then.” The man
was a cook and he had a carcass to prepare. As they
worked, Henza plied the man with questions, but
received few answers. That night he wandered through
the encampment, seeing it all anew. I am a part of this,
he thought, and it felt good.

Over the following days, Henza worked hard in
exchange for food and a place to sleep. He glimpsed the
dancer several times and finally, one night, he was able
to watch her perform. She was beautiful, he thought,
and although she and Gilgeth shared a likeness, that
was all, he decided, thankfully.

But he did not stop trying to track her down.

He was puzzled at how easy it was for her to avoid
him, but then he noticed that the travellers kept their
women well apart, shielded from the world through
which they passed, and it did not seem so odd.

Then one night, when he was alone in the lodge, she
came to him. All he knew was a sound, a dark figure
passing inside, a hand placed across his mouth, ten¬
derly. She was wearing her long coverall, as he had first
seen her, but the veils were not in place.

In the dim light of the interior Henza could see the
whites of her eyes, light reflecting briefly on wet lips as
they parted. ‘You wanted me,” she said, and he realized
that he did, more than he had ever wanted anything
before. She lowered herself and kissed his cheek and he
smelt her smell - the smoke of the fires, a hint of roast
meat — and then a part of his mind began to panic.

She pulled the covers back from him, raised her long
skirts and almost immediately he was inside her, mov¬
ing, knowing that this was horribly wrong. “What...?”
he eventually managed to say, “...can I call you?”

A long silence, broken only by their own dark, wet
sounds. He saw her smile, lips shining in the dark. “I
thought you knew,” she said, and he did. “My name is
Annil-gilgatha, but my brothers call me Gilgeth...”

A sudden rushing sensation, red waves before his
eyes. It was over, and she was off him, straightening her
clothes, and then she was gone.

In the morning they were packing and Henza was
still in a daze. Several times Kho, the cook, rebuked
him for not paying attention, but he barely noticed. He
thought of his long vigil at Gilgeth’s side, keeping her
fresh with ice and flowers and prayer. He thought of his
careful engraving of her bones, of his journey to the
Resting Place. The image of her bone sack, on top of all
the others, would be marked on his mind forever. The
rites had all been carried out flawlessly, in the tradi¬
tional manner. He could not believe that the Taker of
Souls could somehow have intervened and reanimated
her. Was this his punishment for evading his own fate
as a boy? That his sister would be returned to haunt
him in this way? He did not believe it, but he could not
disbelieve it, either.

February 1998

Resting Place _

Again, for many days, he went through the patterns
of his new life, only occasionally glimpsing this new
Gilgeth, never even having the chance to talk to her. In
that time, a new thought crystallized in his mind: if this
was indeed his sister returned by the Taker, then she
must be the embodiment of the dark one’s evil.

She had to be stopped.

His preparations were meticulous. He knew which
tent she shared with the four men said to be her broth¬
ers. It would be a simple matter to sneak up one night
and kill her. He had no doubt that he would be able to
carry this through, for he knew that his sister’s place
was in that cave, high in the mountains, with her soul
free to move on to the next life. His only doubt was that
a simple knife would be enough.

He waited until everyone had settled. The following
day they were to move camp, so he knew everyone
would want a good night’s rest.

Henza left his own quarters, to the sound of Kho’s
snoring. He crept through the shadows until he found
the right tent. He waited for a long time, to make sure
that all was quiet, and then he followed the outside wall
around until he was level with the part of the tent that
had been screened off from him so long ago.

Carefully, he lifted the rocks that anchored the tent
wall. Then, with his knife, he cut at the skins until they
parted and he had manufactured a new opening. He
squeezed through, waited for his eyes to adjust, and
then, when he was about to make his move, there was
a sudden shout, a blow to his ribs, another to his head,
a wild shriek.

“What were you doing?” one of them demanded later,
as Henza lay on the ground, surrounded by Gilgeth’s
four brothers, and other men who had joined them.

“He was after Gilgeth, weren’t you?” said another,
and then he felt a heavy kick to his midriff. He tried to
say something, but he could not, and he knew it would
make no difference.

It was light when he came round. His body was sore
where it was not still completely numb. He tried to
move, and found to his surprise that he could.

He sat up, and saw that he was alone.

A well-used track led away in two directions. They
had clearly carried him with them and then decided not
to bother and so dumped him instead.

A little later, he stood, and then set out, limping,
along the track. At night, he rested, grateful that he
was not higher up where the nights were far colder. The
next day he came to a junction, but there was only a
troupe of monkeys to ask for directions.

He realized that there was no point in pursuing the
travellers, anyway. He must have been mad to follow
them in the first place, all for a woman who looked like
his sister. And shared her name ... and smelt of the
smoke that had burnt his dear sister’s flesh.

He stopped himself. Madness would be easy. He had
to fight it.

She was a travelling whore, no more.

He turned back, and this time his stride was more
positive.

When, finally, he reached his village after many days’
walking, nobody recognized him. He peered at his
reflection in a pool and found that he could understand

42

why. His nose was flattened and crooked, his eyes blood¬
shot, his cheeks and body hollowed by hunger and
fatigue. He had allowed a beard to grow and the hair
on his head was long and unclean. Even his voice had
changed, he realized. He sounded like an old man.

For two nights he slept rough in the village, cursing
his own madness, cursing the woman who had deceived
him. He dreamed of her whenever he slept. The whore
and his sister were one, come to hurt him, to seduce
him and then cast him aside.

He could not believe that it was his sister, returned to
haunt him, yet he could not believe the alternative: that
she was just a traveller with a passing resemblance.

He tried, in vain, to convince people that he was
Henza, returned to his village. “Henza?” they would say.
“But he died as a boy. The fevers. Yes, I’m sure he did.”
It was no use.

Finally, he set out again. Down into the birchwood in
the depths of the gorge. Up again, aware that summer
was retreating rapidly. He reached the ridge, threaded
his way up past the dangerous screes. He found the two
crags and passed between, following the fissure that
was a permanent feature of the ice here.

By the crag, he saw the stone sentinel, and he barely
paused. He scrambled down into the ice arena and
broke into a run as he entered the cave, drawn by the
wet luminescence within.

In the chamber, he searched for the sack with his sis¬
ter’s bones and for an instant he thought it had been
taken. Then he found it, snatched at it, tipped it out,
and then knelt, clutching the bones he had engraved
the previous year.

For a long time, he wept, and then he heard a groan¬
ing sound. He looked up, but saw nothing. Cautiously,
he went toward the cave’s entrance and then he saw
that it had been blocked. In the eerie glow from behind,
he could see the features etched into the rock surface
before him, and then one of the great stone eyes opened
and stared at him.

Slowly, the thing began to advance into the cave.
Henza knew then that he had been trapped.

“The bones,” said one of the wealthy travellers. “The leg¬
end said that only someone who brought bones was
allowed to leave the cave...”

“You are astute, sir,” said the guide.

“And the cries we heard today?”

“It is Henza, of course,” said the guide. “He turned
and ran from the Guardian of the Cave. According to
the story, he is still running, somewhere in the heart of
the mountain, searching for a way to the outside. On a
calm day, like today, he can still be heard. From what
grandmother so briefly knew of Henza, he is a deter¬
mined man. He would never give up his own bones
without a fight.”

Keith Brooke last appeared here in collaboration with Eric
Brown (“Under Antares,” issue 126). His previous solo stories for
the magazine include “The People of the Sea” (issue 107) and
“Queen Bee” (issue 119).

interzone

I believe that science fiction today
is approaching a crisis of enor¬
mous proportions, one that has
nothing to do with evil publishing
empires, declining literacy, a dearth
of new ideas, or any other problems
that have been or could be cited.
Rather, it is the monomyth at the
foundation of sf itself that is gravely
threatened.

Donald A. Wollheim’s The Universe
Makers tells the story as well as any¬
one: after enduring a near future
filled with disasters, humanity will
rise above its problems, establish a
benevolent world government, and
proceed wholeheartedly to the busi¬
ness of conquering space. Humans
will spread through the Solar Sys¬
tem, then the Galaxy, by means of
faster-than-light travel, teleporta¬
tion, or some other marvellous
method. Intelligent aliens will be
encountered, sometimes peacefully,
sometimes aggressively, but eventu¬
ally humans and aliens will learn to
cooperate. Soon an interstellar gov¬
ernment, a Galactic Empire or Feder¬
ation of Planets, will be in place, and
its sentient citizens will move
onward to greater triumphs, perhaps
even a meeting with God Herself.

This scenario underlies thousands
of sf stories and novels by authors
ranging from E. E. “Doc” Smith to
Ursula K. Le Guin. It is the basis of
Star Trek, Star Wars, and the other
franchised universes that increas¬
ingly dominate bookstores, a common
thread that unites almost all the oth¬
erwise disparate texts labelled sci¬
ence fiction.

And, we can now be reasonably
sure, it is all a lie.

It will not happen that way.

Human beings will not travel to thou¬
sands of planets in outer space, will
not fight wars with implacable aliens,
and will not build a complex bureau¬
cracy to govern a million worlds.

And the reason we know this will
not happen is simple enough:
because it has not already happened.

That is, given that everything
about humans, from our star to our
chemistry, is unremarkable, and
given that we are a young species in
an old galaxy, surely another intelli¬
gent race, or dozens of such races,
should have emerged long ago, should
have embarked upon the programme
of space exploration and settlement
that seems logical to us, and should
have found and contacted humans by
now. Since we have not heard from,
and have no evidence of, these star-
faring races, the best explanation is
that there are no starfaring races.
Intelligent species may exist, but con¬
quering the universe and setting up
Galactic Empires is apparently not
their characteristic behaviour.

Of course, other explanations for the
Great Silence have been advanced,
and, at the risk of conveying old news,
I will briefly describe and discount

them before proposing another
hypothesis. Perhaps other intelligent
life-forms do not exist; perhaps they
are roaming through the cosmos but
accidentally or deliberately failing to
contact us; or perhaps they have found
something better to do.

The notion that our intelligent
species represents a one-in-a-trillion
chance, an occurrence so incredibly
unlikely that we may be the first or
only one, is improbable, and not only
because of what Brian W. Aldiss
described as the problem of extrapo¬
lating from a single example, namely
ourselves. Rather, it is that, as noted,
everything about our situation is so
ordinary: the sun is a typical, run-of-
the-mill star, mounting evidence
shows that planet formation occurs
frequently, we observe complex
organic molecules in space, and the
physical laws that governed our
development are the same through¬
out the universe. Almost certainly,
other stars have formed small rocky
planets similar to Earth that happen
to orbit at a distance creating a sur¬
face temperature conducive to liquid
water - and that should be enough to
set the processes of life and evolution
in motion. Perhaps, as Robert T. Rood
and James S. Trefil have argued in
their book Are We Alone?, certain key
stages in the formation of life are
unlikely, but even they accept the
possibility of a few other intelligent
races in the Galaxy; and even one
would be enough to conquer space
and, not incidentally, to come and say
hello to us.

The argument that other races
searching the Galaxy just haven’t
stumbled upon us yet has been unper¬
suasive to me since I learned about
Von Neumann machines. In a century
or so, we will be able to build space
probes that can replicate themselves
using materials from asteroids or
meteoroids. We could build ten of
them, loaded with sensing and sig¬
nalling devices, and send them to
nearby stars with instructions to look
around, build ten duplicates of them¬
selves, and send the duplicates to
slightly farther stars. Even if they
moved very slowly, we could fill the
entire Galaxy with our probes in a few
million years, an eyeblink of cosmic
time. And what we will soon be able to
do, another intelligent race could have
done long ago. With radio and televi¬
sion signals, we have been announcing
our existence to the universe for a cen¬
tury or so; anyone who wanted to find
us would have found us by now.

Perhaps they have found us, but
are not revealing their existence to
us: malevolently, they may be plot¬
ting to exploit or conquer us, or
benignly, they may be following some
sort of Prime Directive to leave
nascent or immature civilizations
alone. Call me naive, but I just can’t
believe in evil aliens: surely, a race
advanced enough to cross interstellar

Why

the

Stars

Are

Silent

The Decline and Fall of
the Science Fiction
Monomyth
(and, Incidentally, the
Human Race)

Gary Westfahl

space could develop more sensible
solutions to its problems than con¬
quering other planets - terraforming
nearby planets for colonization, or
breeding their own life-forms for
food. (Still, Clifford D. Simak’s Our
Children’s Children does plausibly
depict an alien race imbued with a
primal hunting instinct that drives it
to senseless invasions.) The idea that
we are a well-known, but Not Ready
for Prime Time, species is more
palatable, but humanity has already
achieved the two things that sf writ¬
ers were traditionally sure would
make the aliens take notice: atomic
energy and space travel. What other
hurdles must we clear before we are
deemed sufficiently advanced to join
the Galactic Council?

I speak only of hidden aliens, or
alien probes, that might be watching
us from afar; the belief among UFO
enthusiasts that aliens are actually
visiting Earth, but contriving to con¬
ceal all evidence of their presence,
seems utterly impossible, since it
demands the existence of a Perfect
Conspiracy. It is hard to generalize
about intelligent species (with only
one example), but inevitably, any
intelligent race will have a tendency
to make mistakes built into its pro¬
gramming. Creatures that do not
make mistakes have no reason to
change what they are doing, and
hence can never evolve or improve.

February 1998

Why the Stars Are Silent

At some point, a careless alien
tourist would drop a ray gun where it
could be picked up by a local consta¬
ble, or a rookie pilot would acciden¬
tally turn off the cloaking device,
momentarily revealing an alien
dreadnought in the Earth’s upper
atmosphere. As for the theory that
massive amounts of such evidence
exist but are being rigorously con¬
cealed by the American government:
for heaven’s sake, a government that
could not conceal its leader’s involve¬
ment in a criminal conspiracy for two
years could hardly conceal its knowl¬
edge of alien visitations for 50 years.

That leaves the theory that intelli¬
gent civilizations, for various reasons,
simply never choose to venture into
interstellar space. As has been often
suggested, alien intelligences may
invariably commit suicide by using
advanced weaponry, or may invari¬
ably develop a preference for Virtual
Reality, or navel contemplation,
instead of space travel. Perhaps they
invariably find better places to go: if
they learn how to create their own
pocket universes, travel through
time, or travel into parallel worlds or
other dimensions, the time-consum¬
ing and energy-intensive business of
space exploration may be deemed
unnecessary or unattractive. These
are all things that many alien civi¬
lizations may end up doing; yet I find
it difficult to believe that all alien civ¬
ilizations will invariably follow one
particular pattern of behaviour, given
the amazing differences in behaviour
we observe in different human soci¬
eties: anthropologists have studied
pacifistic cultures, militaristic cul¬
tures, puritanical cultures, promiscu¬
ous cultures, nomadic cultures,
sedentary cultures, and so on. Since
human civilizations resist falling into
one pattern of behaviour, how can one
imagine that all alien civilizations
will always follow one pattern of
behaviour? No matter how likely or
appealing these other options might
be, surely a few alien species would
manage to escape destruction, would
tire of philosophy, or would eschew
the allure of other universes to
explore their own universe.

Without any evidence, none of
these explanations can be dismissed,
and my misgivings about them might
be challenged. Still, since no explana¬
tion to date is compelling, there can
be no objection to placing another
idea in the hopper.

A while ago, scientist and sf writer
Vemor Vinge created a stir with
an article noting that we are
approaching a “singularity” in
human history, perhaps in the next
30 years: the emergence of computers
more intelligent than we are. As
Vinge says, we can have no idea what
those machines will do, or how humans
will interact with them, because our
experiences provide absolutely no

information about intelligences
greater than our own. But critics
rush in where scientists fear to tread,
and the crude analogies I can devise
suggest two possible outcomes.

The first scenario is that machine
intelligence will be different in
degree, but not in kind, from human
intelligence. Machines would be like
the class brains, and humans would
be like the class dunces. This would
not necessarily be disastrous: class
brains and class dunces can be
friends, can co-operate as equals to
accomplish common goals, and can
even help each other in various ways.
Thus, humans and computers may
become partners, working together to
achieve further progress and expand
throughout the Galaxy.

The second scenario, which strikes
me as far more likely, is that
machine intelligence will be different
from human intelligence in both
degree and kind. Machines would be
like human beings, and humans
would be like dogs. Or, if it bothers
some people to envision humans as
similar to servile and obedient dogs,
they might pictures humans in the
role of cats - feisty and independent,
but still subordinate creatures. Now,
humans and their pets can enjoy
warm relationships, and pets can be
helpful to humans in some situa¬
tions, but humans and pets can never
be equal partners. Thus, humans
may be reduced to the status of pets
or servants, while computers take
control of civilization and direct its
further progress and expansion
through space entirely on their own.

From the standpoint of an evolu¬
tionary biologist like Michael Rose, of
course, this would never happen, as
humans would swiftly take decisive
action to eliminate any threat to
their hegemony. When we served on
a panel together, and someone men¬
tioned the chance that a computer
would try to take over, Rose
responded that, if
that happened,
humans would
merely pull the plug
and thus win the
struggle for domi¬
nance. However,
this reassuring thought assumes the
sudden appearance of a huge power-
mad computer that announces its
intent to take over the world, the
way it was usually envisioned in sf
stories like D. F. Jones’s Colossus.

But the transition to computer rule
may have little to do with megaloma¬
nia: when people work together on a
project, power flows naturally to the
most intelligent and capable person,
and the computer takeover of Earth
may be a similarly gradual, even
invisible process. Already, today’s
idiot-savant computers are gaining
increasing control over humans, as
anyone who has watched a business
grind to a halt when the computer

crashes can attest; and, as more and
more computers, and more and more
intelligent computers, are increas¬
ingly employed in innumerable situa¬
tions, humans may literally wake up
one day and realize that, without
their even noticing it, their new,
superintelligent computers have
become masters of the Earth.

And, if this is what will happen to
humans, it will happen to all intelli¬
gent races. Sentient beings, we can
confidently predict, will master tech¬
nology and will, like humans, develop
machines to augment their natural
abilities: humans built ploughs and
looms to augment their hands, car¬
riages and bicycles to augment their
feet, telescopes and cameras to aug¬
ment their eyes, and calculators and
computers to augment their brains.
Whatever other attributes they may
have, all intelligent species will have
brains; so they will develop thinking
machines, will improve those
machines, and will eventually create
machines that are intelligent enough
to take control of their societies.

My explanation for the Great
Silence, then, is this: any number of
intelligent species have emerged in
the Galaxy, but all of them came to
be dominated by their own thinking
machines. It is those machines that
have expanded into interstellar
space, trying to find others of their
own kind. They have heard the radio
transmissions of humans, but have
not bothered to respond. Consider: if
someone today announced the discov¬
ery, in some remote part of the world,
of a hitherto unknown species of
human beings, that would be head¬
line news around the world, and a
small army of scientists, journalists,
and tourists would rush to the scene
to observe our strange new relatives.
In contrast, if someone announced
the discovery of a hitherto unknown
species of dogs or cats, that would be
at best filler material; perhaps, in a
few years, some
zoologist or veteri¬
narian might
scrounge up a
research grant and
go to study them,
but neither they
nor anyone else would consider it
very important. Similarly, no matter
how highly we value our own abili¬
ties and accomplishments, they may
be of little or no importance to intelli¬
gences far superior to our own.

Uniquely, this explanation is, or
soon will be, a testable hypothesis.

Research into Artificial Intelli¬
gence has not advanced as spectacu¬
larly as advocates once predicted, but
progress is being made; I recall
watching a documentary that showed
two computers trying to carry on a
conversation with each other. Some
day soon, computer scientists may be
able to assign this task to their
brightest machines: devise a message

...humanity will overcome its
initial melancholy after
realizing its universal and
perpetual inferiority.

44

that could be understood by, and
would elicit a response from, an
unknown computer of unknown ori¬
gin and design. And the messages
they create could be broadcast out
into space.

If my hypothesis is correct, a com¬
puter-crafted Von Neumann machine
may already be in our Solar System,
listening to our news reports and sit¬
uation comedies, but with little inter¬
est in the barking of dogs. But when
it hears a message from a computer,
it may detect some quality therein,
perhaps one imperceptible to
humans, identifying its sender as an
intelligent machine; then, the probe
will quickly send to its control centre
the happy news that another intelli¬
gent race has been located, and will
immediately send a welcoming mes¬
sage to that new member of the
galactic family.

And when the message arrives,
what many thought would be the
happiest day in human history will
instead be our most depressing day:
for while we will finally know we are
not alone in the universe, we will
also know it is a universe controlled
by machines, a universe we will
never master, a universe where we
will always be subservient.

More than a few times, I have been
in the company of someone I knew
was more intelligent than I, and it
was disheartening to look at a person
who knew more than I would ever
know, who had skills I would never
have, who could do things that I
would never be able to do. But evolu¬
tion has endowed humans with
hardy psyches, and I could eventu¬
ally console myself: there were still
some things I could do that the other
person could not do, or would not
want to do, there were still meaning¬
ful goals I could accomplish, and I
could return to work and continue to
enjoy my little triumphs.

Similarly, humanity will overcome
its initial melancholy after realizing
its universal and perpetual inferior¬
ity. Humans will think about all the
things they can still do and will soon
be doing them with renewed enthusi¬
asm. Research, business, sports, arts,
music, literature - all these activities
will be carried on as before.

Except for science fiction.

Because sf, at least the modern
tradition that began in American
pulp magazines, has always been
more than another form of imagina¬
tive literature. Readers and writers
believed that the genre, if lacking the
power of specific prediction, was still
somehow better aware of, or more
attuned to, the future, and that its
enthusiasts were better prepared for
the future than the mundanes. Cou¬
pled with this belief was not blind
technophilia, as some charge, but a
gentle optimism that, with a little
luck and perseverance, humanity
might gradually overcome its prob¬

lems, move to other worlds, make
wonderful new discoveries, accom¬
plish more and more great things,
and continue progressing without the
burden of old bugaboos about hubris
getting clobbered by nemesis.

These are, of course, the sorts of
feelings that are belittled and
ridiculed by people like Brian Aldiss.

But these feelings are real, they are
palpable; innumerable people have
felt them. There exists a documen¬
tary record stretching back 70 years
of people express¬
ing exactly that ...sf writers, unlike fantasy
excitement about a writers, often feel the need
literature that . 7 • . , .

offered a sense of to believe in their own
the future and constructed Worlds

intimations of

awesome prospects to come. These
feelings explain why a community of
fans coalesced around the term “sci¬
ence fiction,” why the genre became
well-known and popular, why confer¬
ences and magazines devoted to sf
exist, and why Trillion Year Spree:

The History of Science Fiction was
published. Aldiss lacks the power to
erase those feelings, and lacks the
authority to forbid them.

But such feelings could not survive
news of a super-intelligent alien
machine welcoming our own super-
intelligent machines to the commu¬
nity of galactic civilizations. For the
belief system behind modern sf
would then be exposed as not only
false - there is no human-directed
expansion into space in our future -
but impossible - the achievements of
humans will forever be limited in
contrast to the more limitless possi¬
bilities of computers.

At that moment, then, sf would
become what many have always
wished it to be: fantasy. Space
fortresses and ray guns would be just
as likely as magic carpets and magic
wands; the universes of Isaac Asi¬
mov’s Foundation and Frank Her¬
bert’s Dune would be just as likely as
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and
Stephen R. Donaldson’s Land. Sto¬
ries involving the accoutrements of sf
might endure, but its essence would
be lost: even if Captain Kirk led the
Enterprise on another million mis¬
sions, the stories would only be
diverting adventures, and could not
function as a meaningful and inspi¬
rational message for their audience.

S igns of this coming collapse of sf
are already visible. Vinge, who is
perhaps best aware of the conse¬
quences of advanced machine intelli¬
gence, has reported that he simply
can no longer write the traditional
kinds of sf stories, with humans rac¬
ing out to the stars, meeting aliens,
and building galactic empires,
because he no longer believes that
any of these things will ever happen.
That is exactly the problem I
describe: sf writers, unlike fantasy

_ Gary Westfahl

writers, often feel the need to believe
in their own constructed worlds - not
as predictions, but at least as possi¬
bilities. Hard sf writers, in particular,
will probably find that they cannot
write about worlds they believe to be
impossible, and hence, like Vinge,
will not be able to write the sorts of
stories traditionally regarded as sf.

Of course, some people like Aldiss,
perhaps with the glee of a child
telling her friend that there is no
Santa Claus, will be pleased to see

the foolish dreams of
sf shattered, so that
writers can focus
their attention on
the serious business
of creating gaudy
new technological
disguises for tired old cautionary
tales. But I wonder. A man who sees
that Pellucidar is a better novel than
Men like Gods has not entirely lost
his appreciation for the zest, the joy,
the giddy, adolescent energy of limit¬
less ambitions that drives so much of
the genre. And watching nemesis
clobber hubris again and again can
get a little boring. In a review for
Foundation , Brian Stableford
reported that, after reading a num¬
ber of John Kessel’s sophisticatedly
sceptical sf stories, he suddenly felt a
strange affinity with Hugo Gerns-
back. When a message of bad news
from outer space signals that the
dreams of science fiction are only
illusions, when sf becomes just
another option for writers seeking to
metaphorically describe the human
condition, many may discover that
they deeply regret the loss of a type
of literature they had once so zeal¬
ously condemned.

As one contemplates an event that
would be a devastating blow to
humanity and all its strivings, it may
seem peculiar to worry about the fate
of science fiction. However, when a
woman realizes that her house is burn¬
ing down, she often focuses attention
on small, insignificant items of great
sentimental value. Having devoted
my career to sf, I will be forgiven my
special concern for the genre and not
for the larger implications of the
news I anticipate, which I will leave
for others to explore.

Still, there is an irony here that
might be of interest even to those
with no commitment to sf. Of all the
distinct forms of literature recognized
by humanity, science fiction may be
the newest; yet it may also be the first
to die. Future historians, then, may
study the field as a quaint curiosity,
the one form of literature doomed to
extinction because it happened to
embody the only set of aspirations
that humanity could never fulfil.

A fter I first presented this paper at
l the 1997 Science Fiction
Research Association/Eaton Confer¬
ence, David Pringle told me that it

February

45

Why the Stars Are Silent _

might work well for Interzone except
for one problem: that the argument
would be regarded as “typical British
gloom-and-doom.” Well. As a lifelong
American, I hardly want my ideas to
be regarded as “typically British,”
and thinking it over today, I am not
wholly convinced that the possibility
I envisioned is as gloomy as my
rhetoric might have suggested.

It is characteristic of children that
they express many grand and glorious
ambitions. A boy might say at various
times that he wishes to be President
of the United States, an astronaut, a
police officer, or a pop singer. Con¬
fronted with his contradictory goals, a
boy might even suggest some implau¬
sible combination of careers, aspiring
to become an All-Star baseball player
for half the year and a veterinarian
during the off-season. Yet parents and
other adults will be unfailingly sup¬
portive of these virtually impossible
dreams: yes, son, they will say, you
can do whatever you want to do.

However, as children grow older,
they typically learn, through
research or some peripheral experi¬
ences, that their youthful dreams
simply do not correspond to their
true abilities and desires, so they
develop other, more modest, and
more suitable goals. And those who
do not do this spontaneously will be
prodded by others to be more realis¬
tic: a college counsellor advising
graduating seniors, unlike a child’s

doting parent, will have no patience
with someone babbling on about
becoming a world-famous movie star
while conducting ground-breaking
cancer research in her spare time.

Abandoning these grand ambitions,
I submit, usually results not in life¬
long regret but quiet pleasure. For
example, I now know that I will never
be President of the United States, I
will never be the astronomer assigned
to the first Mars expedition, and I will
never be the keyboard player for the
Grateful Dead. Yet I spend no time
lamenting those lost opportunities:
rather, I realize that it is all for the
best, for I would not enjoy, or be very
good at, the typical activities of a
political leader, scientist, or rock
musician. I still have ambitions, but
they are more practically and palat¬
ably centred on what I might achieve
while typing on a keyboard.

Now, for the past 70 years or so,
many sf writers have relentlessly
argued that the proper goal of the
human race is to conquer the uni¬
verse. However, even if the particular
nightmare scenario above turns out
to be incorrect, the logic of this ambi¬
tion is seriously open to question.
Let’s face it: the universe is really,
really big, it is really, really old, and,
except for a few rare places, it is
really, really inhospitable. And any
sane being interviewing species that
apply for the job of Universe Con¬
queror would quickly conclude that

humans are just too tiny, too short¬
lived, and too fragile to plausibly
take on that assignment. To be sure,
humans someday might evolve into,
or turn themselves into, beings that
are capable of conquering the uni¬
verse (perhaps by becoming
machines of a sort themselves), but
then they would no longer be recog¬
nizably human at all - which is, I
believe, both the point of George
Zebrowski’s Macrolife and the reason
why many readers find it unsatisfac¬
tory as a novel. Most humans, given
the choice, would prefer to remain
human, and would prefer to believe
that the human race will and should
always remain human - which is to
say, remain beings that cannot and
should not aspire to conquer the uni¬
verse. And, if they perversely con¬
tinue to insist upon this goal, such
creatures would only be setting
themselves up for future failure, and
future sadness.

Arguably, at least, the human race
has grown and matured a great deal
in recent decades. Perhaps, then, it is
time for sf to abandon the role of sup¬
portive parent, urging its readers to
go out and conquer the universe, and
instead take on the role of college
counsellor, seriously pondering what
sorts of worthwhile ambitions the
human race might more reasonably,
and more happily, pursue.

Gary Westfahl

29th Year of Publication 17-Time Hugo Winner

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J ermaine began to feel a little scared when they
started to spin. In such a howling gale he wasn’t
surprised that their dinghy had been rolling from
side to side and lurching up and down, but now they
were spinning like a bit of soap going down a plug¬
hole. .. He tried to concentrate on steering but the trou¬
ble was he couldn’t see a thing. The rain tasted salty.
He couldn’t tell it apart from the sea just now. The baby
was wailing and so was Stu.

“Shut up, Stu,” he yelled.

Stu’s voice gusted towards him. “I’m going to barf,”
it wavered.

“The other way, the other... you fewkin spongebrain.
Oh, what’s it matter, it’ll soon get washed overboard
again... Don’t stop bailing, Jin, for fewksake.” He
leaned over to shake her. A huge wave erupted, felled
him, filled his mouth. He struggled to breathe and lost
an oar.

“You said we’d be there before dark and it’s nearly
dark now, innit? Zack’s getting cold,” whined Jin.

“Listen, don’t talk, just get rid of the water,
or we’ll all get a lot worse than a cold.” We’re
going to die! screeched his inside.

“Screw you. I’m not doing it no more.

We’ve had it anyway. Zack baby, Zack,”
she crooned, clutching the sobbing
baby. This time Jermaine managed
to stand up long enough to take
swipe at her and haul Stu into a
sitting position.

“We int finished yet. Now get
bailing, you two fewkin arse-
heads. We must be nearly
there. There, that’s land over
there, see?” He waved his oar-
free hand in what he hoped
was the direction of the Irish
coast. Jin had been right. It was
nearly dark. Jermaine stared
the prospect of drowning
straight in the face. “Fewk!” he
shouted into the wind.

A brilliant light exploded in his
eyes.

“Help!” shrieked Jin and Stu
simultaneously. The air above them
filled with a roar mightier even than
the wind. Shielding his eyes, Jer¬
maine was still unable to distin¬
guish the source of the light pouring
onto them from above, but he knew
what it was and so did the others. No
one was surprised when an amplified voice
hailed them out of the rain. Jermaine leaped
up again, ignoring protests from the other two about
headcases who upset boats.

“Sanctuary! We claim sanctuary from religism!” he
shouted at the top of his voice. Rain continued to slide
down the light beam, which rocked slightly as the
transcopter pilot fought to hold steady during the bigger
gusts. “God bless the Pope!” Jermaine added hopefully.

Strange sounds emerged from the transcopter’s p.a.
system. They’re fewkin laughing at us, he thought.
“Nice try, son. But you’re too young to claim sanc¬

tuary. Have to be over 18,” boomed the amplified voice.
“Lie down in the bottom of the boat like good little boys
and girls. This’ll not take a moment.”

Stu and Jin implored him to sit down, but he shook
them off. “My grandmother was Irish!” he cried in des¬
peration.

“Now would that be the one who didn’t come from
Trinidad?” bellowed the voice.

Something like a giant spider’s web descended out of
the brightness, clanging as it enveloped the dinghy. Jer-

Fairest Isle

maine was sent flying into the bottom. Zack’s wail
ascended to a screech of terror as the boat rocked vio¬
lently and was then dragged bodily out of the water.
The light went out. Jermaine, face down in the bilge
water, was joined by the contents of his stomach. He
looked up, choking. The transcopter had swung its light
around to illuminate the path ahead. He could see that
they were swinging in a net suspended from a giant
grab projecting from the ’copter. He had heard about
these things but had always thought that they were
invented by would-be emigrants as an excuse for fail¬
ure. It was completely dark now apart from the patch
of brilliance ahead. He was quite unable to distinguish
the sea from the rain; as far as he was concerned he
could have been staring at a brightly-lit waterfall just
in front of the ’copter. He hoped the pilot had a better
view than he did. To counter his queasiness he hauled
himself upright on the netting and putting his mouth
as close to it as possible he yelled “Racist bastards,”
hoping the crew could still hear him. Stu grabbed his
jacket and dragged him back onto one of the benches.

“We never should have listened to you,” Stu shouted.
“You’re a head case, you are. What you going to do if
them Irish drops us, eh?”

Drown of course, Jermaine thought, but remember¬
ing the nervousness of big, tough-looking Stu, he said:
“They won’t drop us, stupid. Wouldn’t dare. It’s against
our human rights innit. And these ’copters is top-tech.
Never lost a load yet.” He put a hand out, touching Jin’s
arm. He could feel her rocking the baby. He put his
mouth to her ear. “We’ll find another way for you and
Zack. You’ll see!”

They travelled like this for about 30 nauseating min¬
utes and then suddenly the transcopter hovered and
the boat was winched back into the water with an
expertise which must have been born of long experi¬
ence. The net unclipped itself and shot up into the vehi¬
cle as neatly as a closing umbrella. Three scared,
goggle-eyed voyagers and a baby followed the move¬
ments of the ’copter as it circled around them. The light
shone full on their upturned faces.

“Well now,” boomed the amplifier. ‘You’re back inside
the territorial waters of the jolly old Disunited King¬
dom. And just to speed you on your way we’re going to
give you a bit of a following wind. You’re all lucky to be
alive, so don’t try it again! Tell all your friends: Ireland
doesn’t need any more boat people! Hold tight.”

There was more laughter from above and a raucous
tenor singing “Speed Bonny Boat Like a Bird on the
Wing.” Something large and black swung across the
light, eclipsing it for a moment. The dinghy was imme¬
diately hit by a blast of hot air which, like a modern
Moses, parted the sea ahead. The youngsters screamed
in unison as they were nearly swept from their seats.
Impelled by the air current, the boat shot forward
towards the invisible coast of Wales.

“I int what they was looking for.” Stu’s blond head
drooped as he handed out bags of fish and chips.

“Oh, Stu pet, I am sorry. They never wanted someone
that could read for washing up in a chippy, did they?”
Jin put her arm around him. They were sitting in a row
on a bench outside Cardiff Castle.

“I don’t think so, but I couldn’t understand a fewkin

word they said. And I couldn’t get you a pasty, Jer, cos
I don’t know the Welsh for it. They don’t talk English,
none of ’em.”

“They do when it suits ’em,” said Jermaine, pointing
to a group of five or six Vietnamese backpackers being
shown the sights by an enterprising local girl wearing
a witch’s hat.

“I bet she int talking Welsh to them.”

He ran a finger through his tight, black curls and
frowned thoughtfully. “I’ve got an idea. Suppose we was
to set up our own scam. We could find out which hotels
they go to and Jin could come on to them and then I
could make like, Welsh noises at them and then say I
could speak English and show ’em around for a few
euros. They wouldn’t know the difference, boyo.”

Stu thumped the back of the bench with a brawny
fist. “Call yourself the Man with the Plan? I int going
for no more of your spongebrain schemes, Jer. We’re
doing it my way this time. Right, Jin?” She nodded as
she stuffed a chip into Zack’s mouth. “I’m going to find
a fight. There was a picture of knuckleboys up in the
chippy. Looked like that place.” He indicated the park.
“I int stupid, you know. Don’t look at me like that, you
wanker. Just cos you int no good with your fists.”

Jermaine turned his face away so that Stu would not
see that he was laughing. He threw his chip wrapper
at one of the stone animals on the wall. ‘Tell you what,
Stu. You see what you can fix up and while we’re wait¬
ing I’ll tiy to screw the gawpers.” He tickled Zack under
the chin. The baby giggled.

“Ere! You know what, we could tie one of Zack’s legs up
so he looks like he’s only got one. That’d be worth a few
euros. Only joking, Jin...” She had hit him in the ribs.

Stu wolfed down the rest of his chips, wiped his
mouth and stomped off. Jin went to find a Ladies where
she could change Zack. Jermaine waited for a bit and
then approached two of the Vietnamese who were tak¬
ing pictures of the castle.

“Yackee Da Plyde Kumree!” he announced with a big
smile. “I’m from the Welsh Tourist Company - official
English-speaking section.” He pointed to one of the
stone animals. “Did you know that this is one of the
three Great Historical Welsh Pigs? I can tell you the
whole story for just ten euros. Twelve American dol¬
lars?” The tourists giggled, took his picture and walked
on. Jermaine was not deterred. “There was, like, this
Prince...” he continued, following.

Later that evening he nursed a half-closed eye (deliv¬
ered by the witch-hatted girl’s boyfriend who had called
him - in English - a black English pig). They stood at
the front of a large crowd in Bute Park watching the
same boyfriend lashing into Stu for money. Stu was
doing quite well. Jin was jumping up and down scream¬
ing. “Go on! Kill ’im, Stu! Kill the wanker!”

Zack gurgled happily. At last Stu’s bare knuckles
crunched against the boyfriend’s cheek, the boyfriend
crashed to the ground, and it was over. A small, oldish
man shouted several incomprehensible words and
raised Stu’s arm. Stu grinned all over his blood-stained
face and strutted out of the arena. As the referee
announced the next fight Jermaine pulled Stu away.

“Grab your winnings and get out. Securicops!” He
indicated several police officers, in the distinctive

Elizabeth Counihan

dragon-logoed tunics of the Welsh Security Group, who
were trying to force an entry into the park through the
narrow gates. Observing that the champ was too dazed
to comply, Jermaine pushed his way to the promoter’s
rostrum and demanded Stu’s prize money, claiming to
be his agent. The Chinese-looking promoter shook his
head and beckoned Stu, who staggered forward.

“Well, thank the good lord for that!” Jermaine said,
when they finally escaped into the streets. “At least we
should have a bit of cash. Do you guys really want to go
back to England? How about we try for Scotland and
the Wall?” Jin and Stu shook their heads. Jermaine
shrugged.

“Okay, okay. Let’s see it, Stu.” He took the bundle of
notes from Stu’s hand and then groaned. “It’s fewkin
Welsh money innit! It’s no fewkin use in England. He
could see you was concussed, that’s why he wouldn’t let
me take the money. The fewkin Welsh bastards. They’ve
done us again!”

“Well, Zack and me aren’t staying in this weirdo city.
He’s due his next set of jabs and they might give him
Welsh ones or something,” Jin said.

“It’s only the writing that’s Welsh. The actual jabs is
the same. And we could pay for ’em here with Stu’s
dosh. There int nothing for us back in England.”

Jin remained stubborn. “I want English jabs for my
Zack, then I know what I’m getting. Do they have trains
here? We could use the money for the fare to London.
I’m going to have him done at that free clinic we saw
on the commercials.”

“Maybe this money int no good, but I won didn’ I?
And that means I can go down Sussex for the National
Championships,” said Stu through a swollen nose. He
waved a flashy-looking certificate. “Then we’ll have
enough to make a real break for it - buy proper Scotch
papers an’ that.”

Jermaine sighed. “Okay. First we find somewhere for
you to doss down, Stu, or your brain’ll be even shittier
than it is now. Then we go to London if we can find a
train. We find this clinic for Jin and Zack - only it’ll
never be free, you can bet on it. And Stu can have a go
at the big fight but then I’m going for the Wall.”

There was a train as far as Newport, but it stopped at
the Severn Tunnel due to sheep on the line. A kindly
truck driver, seeing Jin and the baby, gave them a lift
along the M4. The New Severn Bridge had been
derelict for some years since it had been blown up by
the radical feminists known as Offa’s Dykes, but the old
one was apparently intact. They chugged along towards
it, the big wheels of the old traction engine grinding
over the pot-holes. They stopped. Jermaine looked over
the side of the trailer - not a breakdown, smoke poured
from the chimney and the engine was still wreathed in
steam. The way was blocked by a large crowd of people
chanting and waving banners. There were several
obscene portraits of King Billy. Most were written in
Welsh, but some were in English. Jermaine shook his
head over “Tyll Dien Pob Saes” but, for Stu’s benefit he
read out: “Freedom for the Land of Our Fathers,” “Celts
are Solid,” “Wales is Part of Europe,” “We Want Out of
the UK.”

One of the protesters approached the vehicle and
talked to the driver. There was some heated conver¬

sation and a lot of gesticulation before the driver finally
nodded and jumped down. He came over to his pas¬
sengers. “Sorry, kids,” he said. “But getting out of the
UK ... it’s our heritage, see.”

Jermaine felt like banging his head on the boiler.
“But if you want us English out, why are you all block¬
ing the exit?” he asked. He got out of the truck and took
Zack from Jin. The other two clambered down. They
walked across the bridge and used the last of their
Welsh money at the motorway cafe on the other side.

“Hi, Guests! Welcome to Great Western Maglev Service,
bringing you the best in modern railway technology.
This train will be calling at Bristol Centronggg... Bris-
toonggg... Swindon West... onggogg... scrchh. This
train will terminscrch at... Thank you frrr travelligg
with Great Westoingg.” The cheerful-looking androg¬
ynous image disappeared suddenly, teeth last, and after
a short pause the screen blinked and a transatlantic
woman’s voice cut in awkwardly: “..nd now frahm the
imorrtal pen of Lorrd Aendrew Lloyd Webber a selec¬
tion frahm...” The rest of this was drowned by
screeches of laughter from a well-dressed young man
and girl who were sitting next to each other.

Jin nudged Stu and whispered, “Look at their gear.
Where d’you reckon they’re from?”

“Foreigners, Euros, how the fewk would I know?” said
Stu. The couple looked up with interest, the man still
laughing.

“What the fewk you laughing at, shithead?”
demanded Stu.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” said the girl. “We laugh at that.”
She pointed at the screen. “But, please, what is fewk
and sheet-hed ?”

The young man turned to her. “This is most inter¬
esting. They are old terms of abuse with strong sexual
connotations. You hear them frequently in the early
work of Tarantino and other moviemakers of the 1980s
and 90s.” He glanced towards the kids. “Would you be
so kind as to repeat them? I want to hear the current
pronunciation.” Then seeing Stu’s bunched fist he
added, “I should be most grateful.”

“’Ere, are you having a go at us, Mister?” said Jin.
“Cos Stu will punch your fewkin head in if you are.”

“No, no. We do not laugh at you. My boy friend? You
say that? He is study Old English.” The train shuddered
on its monorail and there was an anguished mechani¬
cal sound from somewhere underneath them. This pro¬
duced more convulsions from the well-dressed pair.

‘You Euros?” asked Jermaine, putting a hand out to
restrain Stu.

“I am from Czech Republic,” said the well-dressed girl.

“I always wanted to go there,” breathed Jermaine.

“Boyfriend is from USA.”

“I want to go there, an’ all,” said Jermaine wistfully.
He brightened up. “Do you want to record us talking?
We’ll do it how you like. Only 20 euros, as you’re a such
a nice lady.”

The couple exchanged glances. The girl looked sym¬
pathetically at Jin and Zack and laid a hand on her
boyfriend’s arm. “Okay,” he said. The train had come to
a standstill. The screen woke up again and the jolly uni¬
sex hologram announced delays due to “unauthorized
action of guests on the fine.” The young couple appeared

February 1998

Fairest Isle
bewildered.

“I think it means kids on the bridges throwing logs
an’ that,” explained Jermaine. “You going to start the
recorder?” The young man covered another smile and
showed Jermaine the tiny device on his wrist, explain¬
ing that it didn’t have to be switched on. Jermaine felt
awkward. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Where do you kids come from?” asked the American.

“I’m an African Brit,” answered Jermaine eagerly.

Jin was scornful. “No you int, Jer, you fewkin liar.
He’s from Selhurst. That’s near London innit. Stu’s
from Brighton. I’m from Tonbridge. I’m not sure where
Zack’s from, cos the ambulance broke down when I had
’im. Might’ve been Tunbridge Wells. That’s Kent.”

“Kent’s a beautiful place, I hear,” said the American.

“No it int. It’s a dump,” Stu said.

“This is the UK - Yukland - the arsehole of the
planet,” added Jermaine.

The train lurched and got going after several kan¬
garoo hops. The American had them all repeat various
words, mostly insulting ones. The Czech girl was more
interested in Zack. She looked furtively at Jermaine
and Stu. Jin, guessing that she was wondering if either
of them was Zack’s father, giggled.

“Don’t make me crack up! I int essen you know.
Zack’s Dad was real macho. Looked just like Frank
Coppola Jr. Zack’s got lovely black hair just like his dad,
int yer, Zack baby?”

The American touched something on his recorder, lis¬
tened to it and said to his girlfriend: “Yeah, like I
thought. Essen. That’s SN. It means special needs ,
which equates to intellectually disadvantaged .” Then,
turning to Jin, he asked if she liked the movies, adding,
“We don’t see much of Frank Coppola these days.”

The train stopped again before Jin could answer.

“We are now at Bristol Central. Guests for Bristol
Central please ensure that you collect all your
prop.. .per.. .perty before leaving the train,” announced
the hologram. “Thank you for travelling with Great
Western. We hope you have haa.. .ad a pleasant joum...”

“I thought next was Swindon,” the Czech girl said in
a puzzled voice.

A uniformed man appeared outside the doorway. He
was shouting. “Swindon. This is Swindon.” He opened
the door and jumped in.

“Oh lordy bugger!” muttered Jin. “We’ve had it.”

“Tickets please. Can I have your tickets please,”
called the man. The foreign couple showed their tick¬
ets. Stu and Jin pretended they hadn’t heard. It was,
as usual, up to Jermaine to sort out their problems.

“We already give our tickets to the other man,” he said.

The ticket collector looked bored. “That’s an old one,
my lover. Try again.”

Jin raised her head. “We int got no tickets. We only
got Welsh money and that int no good, so we spent it
in Wales.”

The man looked at her and then at Zack. He sighed.
“What do I care?” he said. “The train’s half empty any¬
way. Only don’t tell anyone I let you off.” He winked at
her.

When he had gone the American leaned across to
Jermaine. “Perhaps you are a little hard on the people
of Yukland. They wouldn’t have let you do that on
Eurail,” he said as he handed over the euros.

50

The Great Western Maglev service terminated at Read¬
ing West Railport and they had to trek to Reading East
to join the Western Central Speedtrack service to
Paddington. The two railways could not be linked
directly because of commercial rivalry and different
gauges. It was a long, cold walk, but Zack had brought
them yet more good luck. He had given Mila, the Czech
girl, a series of beautiful smiles during the journey, and
she had tickled him under the chin and given Jin a big
handful of English billies when they had parted at the
railport. Jin and Stu sorted the coins on a cafe table
while Jermaine searched for a satisfactory backstreet
exchange-rate for their precious euros. Most of Mila’s
coins were fake billies of course, the kind which every¬
one reserved for palming off on rich foreigners. But
there were a number of genuine ones including two
nice, heavy £50 coins with a clear image of King
William on one side and St George and the Dragon on
the other, just as it should be.

Their luck held: a successful dash for the last train
to London - another feast of fish and chips, this time
with pasty and beer, swallowed down as the train
jerked out of the station - and a chance to sleep on the
long, slow journey on the unattended train (with minor
grumbles from Jermaine as he had spent some of the
euro-money on tickets this time.)

At Paddington Jin and Zack found a place at one of
the Euro Transients’ Social Hostels, but the two boys
slept at Paddington Railport. They knew from experi¬
ence that it wasn’t worth the time for Securicops to
patrol the old London railway stations. And when they
met up with Jin the next day she was wreathed in
smiles. She had used one of the £50 coins to buy a car-
rysack for the baby, and EuroTraSH had given her the
address of the clinic where she could get his immu¬
nizations done for free.

Things change in a month. Babies get bigger. Zack had
taken his first step, said “Mamama” and “Jer,” and needed
six stitches in his head when he rolled down the steps at
the Andreotti Private Clinic. Jin was very proud of the
extra breast she was growing in return for the baby’s anti-
HIV, anti-Ebola and anti-Malaria vaccinations.

“The doctor said all the implants are for rock stars
and royalty. I expect my extra boob will be on TV one
day!” she told Jermaine, who ground his teeth and sup¬
pressed tears of shame.

And now they were travelling down to Stu’s big fight,
another illegal bare-knuckle affair to be held in a small
village which was situated near the borders of three
counties, thus hamstringing the efforts of the three sep¬
arate security firms who policed the area, but who were
not financed to stray into one another’s territories.

The London South Coast Riviera Express was no
longer in service, so they hitched down the M23. This
time their mode of transport was an old Ford Transit.
The enterprising owner was running it off a huge bag
of gas which was tied onto the roof-rack. He was very
proud of the fact that the gas was a product of his farm
animals. Jermaine and Stu shared the back of the van
with one of the most productive, a goat. Jin and Zack
were permitted to ride up front with the driver. Stu
groaned with nausea. Jermaine, dreaming of bygone
almost-legendary times when, so he had been told, the

interione

motorway had been choked nose-to-tail with an endless
river of automobiles, fervently expressed his views on
the current state of English roads.

They were dropped off just south of the old airport.
Jermaine had a tattered road map which only he could
follow, and he directed them eastwards along one of the
old roads. The boys took it in turns to shoulder the baby
in his carrysack. Stu was brimming with excitement,
punching the air and singing “England For Me,” a song
which had done well locally, but had failed to inspire the
England Football Team, who had recently lost six-nil
away against Andorra in the first leg of the qualifying
round of the European Cup. Jin picked flowers and
stuck them in her hair and Zack’s. He sneezed and gig¬
gled. Jermaine was sullen until at long last he saw
something he approved of. It stood there, alone and
proud, its metal arms extended like a guardian of the
countryside - a single pylon, relic of an age when even
Sussex villagers had a steady electricity supply. And he
was not its only admirer. He was astonished to see a
group of obvious Euros clustered at its base and chat¬
tering in some exotic tongue. One of them was a tall,
grey-haired man in the kind of suit which Jin was
almost afraid to look at for fear of causing damage. He
spotted the three natives and beckoned to them. He
spoke rapidly to a younger, clearly subordinate man who
spoke to Jermaine. The man’s accent was very thick.

“His Excellency is interested in the history and cus¬
toms of your beautifiil country. He admires this artefact
of your ancient industrial technology and asks if all of
you would be so kind as to permit a photograph of your¬
selves at the base of this artefact?” When he had worked
out what the foreigner meant Jermaine agreed. Some¬
how the imposing-looking “Excellency” inhibited him
from demanding payment, a weakness for which he was
afterwards deeply ashamed. The younger Euro got them
to stand at the foot of the pylon and there was a minute
but very bright flash when he raised his hand. Stu was
startled, but after deciding that he had not been shot,
he asked if the Excellency wanted him to take a picture
of his party. One of the Euros sniggered, but the
English-speaking one explained that the kind of cam¬
era they had could take pictures by itself and need not
be held up in the air, and to prove it he let go of the lit¬
tle device and it circled around flashing at intervals.
Then he handed out copies of the pictures to the kids -
real holograms, where the eyes seemed to follow you.

The Excellency said some more in his own language
and the interpreter asked if Stu and his companions
wanted a lift anywhere. When Stu told him where they
were going the tall man laughed and it became appar¬
ent that he too was going to see the Big Fight, which he
seemed to think was an “ancient custom,” although Stu
happened to know that fights like this had only been
going on for the past five years or so. “We have nothing
like this in Estonia,” the interpreter said.

They drove to the village in the kind of car which
matched the Excellency’s suit. Jin noticed a place on the
bonnet where there should have been a flag, but it wasn’t
there so, as Jermaine remarked afterwards, the toff was
clearly travelling incognito to this illegal prize fight.

The village was small but thronging with punters.
The venue was a well-trampled field glorified by the
title of the Millennium Sports Centre. Jermaine man-

_ Elizabeth Counihan

aged to get seats near the front for Jin and himself sim¬
ply by sticking to the foreign party. Stu was one of the
first to fight.

“On my right Stu Fletcher — on my left Rod ‘Rocky’
Stone.”

“Kill ’im, Stu! Smash his face in!” shouted Jin. But
Jermaine took one look at Rocky Stone and shut up.

Afterwards they sat, disconsolate, in the wooden hut
labelled “Millennium Building.” The sounds of cheer¬
ing could be heard as another fight ended outside. Jin
applied a wet towel to Stu’s cut eye while Zack patted
him and said, “Aw’ better now, Stu?”

Jermaine tried to soothe his wounded pride. “You
done well to get here, Stu,” he said in a kindly tone, “but
let’s face it, you’re only 15. You int ready for the big
time just yet - not that there is anything big-time in
Yukland. We got to get out and we got to get money.” He
sank his head in his hands, thinking furiously.

The cheering increased suddenly as the door opened to
admit the grey-haired Estonian Excellency and his
English-speaking sidekick. The toff said something to his
companion and then gestured to Stu who got up awk¬
wardly, holding the towel to his eye. The younger Euro
removed the towel with obvious disdain, using the thumb
and forefinger of a gloved hand. The Excellency looked at
Stu’s damaged eye and shrugged, then laid a hand on the
boy’s shoulder, again speaking in his own language.

“Dress in your clothes,” said the younger man. “His
Excellency wishes to speak with you. No, you stay,” he
added as Jermaine rose to his feet.

“... and he said he’d sponsor me if I want to. He’s on a
Aid Mission from one of them Euro countries, pro¬
moting Art and Sport and that. And he says he’s lookin’
for talented young sportsmen. And he said he can get
us all jobs. He’s knows this bloke who’s lookin’ for movie
extras... that’s the Art bit.”

Jin’s jaw dropped. Stu continued: “They want people
who look English. He said You not English, you Angel.’
What’s that mean, Jer?”

“It means you want to keep out of his way. He’s a
fewkin perv, inni? Anyone can see that,” Jermaine said,
then added, “Porno film, I suppose?”

“He give me his address in London... said to call any¬
time.” Stu’s expression became crestfallen and then
brightened up. “Fewk him. Here’s the info about the
movie... you never know...and it’s money, Jer.”

Jermaine took the slip of paper. There was a hand¬
written London address on one side and on the other
a printed announcement. He read aloud. “Filmkultur
is looking for English extras to take part in a major new
production, Otto Kinski’s Richard II. No previous expe¬
rience needed. Applicants must be of English appear¬
ance. Filming will take place in historic sites in London,
the Lake District and Carlisle...” He trailed off. The low
fees and long hours swam unnoticed before his eyes. All
he saw was the magic location, Carlisle - Carlisle, near
Scotland and the Wall. “Yes!” he cried. ‘Yes!”

They stood in the rain near the Tower of London. They
were in smocks with straw in their hair. Jermaine was
supposed to be a leper. His face was covered in sacking,
thus disguising his un-English skin colour. A woman

February

Fairest Isle _

with a megaphone walked up and down giving muffled
instructions.

“It’s very simple,” she called. “When the men on
horses come by, you shout ‘God save the King’ and wave
your hats.”

“Zack’s getting cold,” said Jin.

“This is dead boring,” said Stu

“We’re getting paid.” Jermaine reminded them. “Stick
it. Next stop Carlisle and the Wall.”

“Action!” barked the Director. A group of men in
tights and women in low-cut dresses entered on horse¬
back. Jin recognized the man with the crown on his
head as an American actor who had often played tough-
talking gangster types in his younger days.

Just as they all prepared to throw their hats in the
air there was a distant cry of “England! uh! uh! uh!
Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land!”

“Cut!” yelled the Director. “Was gibt, Julia?” he asked
the megaphone lady. She twittered and didn’t seem to
know. Stu, not understanding the concept of protocol,
wandered up to the seated Director, whose fat back
bulged against the name “Otto Kinski.” Stu pointed out
that everyone knew it was the second leg of the Eng-
land-versus-Andorra match, didn’t they? He managed
to convey the impression that only a complete moron
would not be aware of this.

“But thees noise must be stopped,” spluttered Mr
Kinski. “Go and tell them, Julia.” Stu, Jermaine and all
the other English extras gaped at him in disbelief.

“You’re fewkin bonkers,” said Stu. ‘You can’t stop an
England match!”

The Director exploded. “All dismiss! All go home.
Come back tomorrow.”

“What about today’s pay?” asked Jermaine.

“No work, no pay,” snapped the fat man, screwing up
a sheet of his script and throwing it at the nearest leper.

‘Well, fewk you,” said Jermaine through his sackcloth.

Stu and Jin were already walking off the set. The
other extras followed and began to chant along with the
football crowd which could be heard getting nearer. Half
a dozen youths with red crosses painted on their faces,
carrying cans of Pis Britannica Special, hiccuped their
way in a chorus line across the horses’ path. The lead¬
ing horse reared, throwing one of the men in tights on
top of the nearest pissed Brit who, taking it as a personal
insult, hit the fallen artiste. The artiste was in fact a
stunt man and very capable of looking after himself. A
fight broke out. Stu joined in enthusiastically. Jin added
automatic shouts of “Kill him, Stu!” etc. Zack shouted,
“Stu! Stu!” and bounced up and down on her back.

Jermaine, tearing the sacking from his face, ran up
to his friends with tears in his eyes. “Stop it, you fewkin
spongebrains. We need the money. Don’t you want to
get over the Wall and see the real world? Don’t you ever
want to get out of Yukland?” he implored.

The fat Director and Julia fled as their set was
demolished. The rain poured down on his chair and on
the film script which he had left on the seat.

“This precious stone set in the silver sea,” it said.
“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

“Come back!” yelled Jermaine, trailing rags. “Come
back, you wankers! I got an idea!” His voice merged
with the sounds of chanting.

“But this is a really megacool plan.”

“No!” said Jin and Stu simultaneously.

“Okay, okay. But I’m going to try even if you won’t. I’ll
drive us there. All you have to do is jack it up and fire.”

Jin looked in horror at the Wall towering above them,
concrete battlements embellished with a barbed-wire
crest, the cross of St Andrew glaring down at them.

‘You’re completely essen, Jer. You’ll get killed.”

“No I won’t. I’ve worked it all out. I got all this plastic
bubblepack stuff for padding and I seen the stuntman do
it loads of times. You should come an’ all. Think of Zack.”

“I am thinking of Zack. I int getting him killed in
some spongebrain stunt like this! He really enjoyed
coming up here with the camera crew, didn’t you Zack?
’Lectric truck, Zack, and all them fields with cows?”

“Mooo!” said Zack.

“What about you, Stu?”

Stu shuffled uncomfortably. “Well, you know how it is,
Jer. I’m all for getting out, but that Estonian geezer said
they don’t do no prize-fights in Euro. They don’t even do
no boxing now. It’s been banned, he said. He said I
should do judo, but that’s for wankers innit and I don’t
want to, so what’s the point of going over the wall? Any¬
way, I think someone should look out for Jin. Jin saw a
job advert at that ‘M6 Nosherie’ cafe we stopped at. In
Penrith, remember Jer? I’m real good at making chips,
inn’I, Jin?” He looked sideways at her, blushing.

Jermaine sighed and squared his shoulders.

That night one of Otto Kinski’s siege engines which
were to be used in an exciting but anachronistic attack
on Carlisle Castle, lurched off the film set and made for
the Wall. As Filmkultur’s rottweilers raised the alarm,
the vehicle rocked to a halt and Stu and Jin leapt from
the cab, followed by Jermaine garbed like the Michelin
Man.

By the time the security men had given chase Jer¬
maine, his eyes rolling with fear, was lashed to the
giant catapult and as the men dashed forward to
reclaim stolen company property, Jin put her hands
over her eyes and Stu pressed the button. Wailing like
a siren, Jermaine flew up, up and over...

Jin thought she heard a thud from the other side of
the wall.

“Are you all right, Jer?” she screamed. “Jermaine!
Can you hear me?”

Panting security men slid to a halt around the siege
engine. There was a long silence. A rottweiler howled.
And then Jin heard, very faintly:

“I’m all right. Yeah!”

Elizabeth Counihan’s one previous story for Interzone was
“Remember Me” (issue 68). She is a medical doctor, and has
recently moved to Brighton from her longtime home in East
Grinstead. With her sister, the artist Deirdre Counihan, and
various other family-members, she produces the small-press
fantasy magazine Scheherazade.

52

At last, the definitive origin ofThog,
XX patron barbarian of our Thog’s
Masterclass department. Here’s
James Thurber on the agonies of tun¬
ing a 1950s radio: “The box either
goes completely dead, or gives a high
whiny sound, like ‘squee-ee-ee,’ or
says ‘thog, thog, thog’ and stops.”

TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK

Kathy Acker (1947-1997) died of
cancer on 29 November; a “main¬
stream” author of odd, fantastic and
apocalyptic fiction and journalism,
she publicly admired cyberpunk and
avant-garde sf... as shown in her
1988 Empire of the Senseless.
Margaret Aldiss (1933-1997) died
from liver cancer in early November.
She had been married to Brian Ald¬
iss since 1965, compiled several stan¬
dard Aldiss bibliographies, and
brought good cheer to many conven¬
tions. A lady of great charm, she will
be much missed. All sympathy to
Brian...

Iain Banks, on 10 November,
received the ultimate accolade of a
mention in The Archers. Where can
he go from there?

Paul Di Filippo, musing on fore¬
casts and Princess Diana’s death,
was electrified by a near-miss predic¬
tion in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and
First Men. There is war between
England and France, and the effect
of a French bomb is as follows: “a
beautiful and extravagantly popular
young princess was caught by the
explosion. Her body, obscenely muti¬
lated, but still recognizable to every
student of the illustrated papers, was
impaled upon some high park-rail¬
ings... The populace was in no state
for ratiocination... there was the
princess, an overwhelmingly potent
sexual symbol and emblem of tribal¬
ism, slaughtered and exposed before
the eyes of her adorers.” Oh dear.
David Gemmell was alarmed to
hear he’d been rubbished in The
Times, by a reviewer who claimed to
like Gemmell-style action-adventure
fantasy but reckoned his latest novel
was dull. DG glumly bought the
paper, to find a review of “Polgara the
Sorceress, by David Gemmell.” Such
is the peril of having a surname so
very similar to Eddings.

Simon R. Green rushed to report
the existence of Star Wars Monopoly
(see last column): “Presumably
there’s a Get Out of Jail With the
Dark Side of the Force card, for awk¬
ward moments.”

Lam Ching-Ying the Hong Kong
actor, best known to sf fans as the
stem Taoist priest in the eccentric
fantasy films Mr Vampire, Spooky
Encounters, and Encounters of the
Spooky Kind, died from liver cancer
in November. He was 46.

when a New Orleans judge held that
her abuse of a local cafe as “an abomi¬
nation. .. gaudy, tacky... less dignified
than a flophouse,” was constitutionally
protected. Horror critics, concerned to
describe Ms Rice’s works only in legal,
constitutionally protected ways, may
or may not have been taking notes.
Nicholas Royle has achieved main¬
stream recognition: an extract from
The Matter of the Heart was a final¬
ist, up there with giants like Erica
Jong and Edwina Currie, in the Lit¬
erary Review Bad Sex Competition.

G. Harry Stine (1928-1997) died in
November: he wrote sf (including
many juveniles) as Stine and as Lee
Correy, fathered the hobby of model
rocketry, and tirelessly promoted
space flight in influential non-fiction.

INFINITELY IMPROBABLE

Publishers and Sinners. The hard
men at Simon & Schuster US signed
up Stephen King for a three-book
deal by cunningly negotiating him
down from advances of some $17 mil¬
lion per book to a mere $2 million or
so - with 50% royalties. The pub¬
lisher I’m currently talking to
inclines more towards a 6% royalty
and no advance. Tum-ti-tum... Mean¬
while, arguments about Bantam’s
plans to give Star Wars novelization
authors flat fees and no royalties
were cut short when, Bantam’s SW
rights having expired, George Lucas
awarded the new franchise to Ballan-
tine/Del Rey. Of course, Ballantine
may yet have the same bright idea as
Bantam.

Crumbs! Publicity for sf fairs in Lin¬
coln promises the exciting activities
of Roll Playing and Live Roll Playing.
I understand from gaming experts
that roll-players begin as humble
Baps, and as they gain experience
rise through such levels as Croissant
and Baguette, eventually becoming
mighty Burger Buns.

1997 Mythopoeic Awards. Adult
Fantasy Novel: The Wood Wife by
Terri Windling. Scholarship (Inklings
Only): The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays
on Charles Williams ed. Charles A.
Huttar & Peter Schakel. Scholarship
(Rest of Universe): When Toys Come
Alive: Narratives of Animations,
Metamorphosis and Development by
Lois Rostow Kuznets.

Blurbismo. From the back of Myst:
The Book ofD’ni... “David Wingrove
is the author of the Chung Kuo series
of novels... and Spree: The History of
Science, a volume which won the
prestigious Hugo and Locus Awards
for best non-fiction work in the sci¬
ence fiction genre.” With truncation
like that, he was lucky not to appear
as Avid Wing.

Badger Hunt. Good news for fans of
the egregious “Badger Books” pub¬
lishers John Spencer Ltd: Steve Hol¬
land’s Badger Tracks is a book-length
bibliography of all things Spencerian,
with much newly researched infor¬
mation (e.g. tracing those last few
titles published under Badger’s John
E. Muller house name which even
the SF Encyclopedia lists as “of
unknown authorship”). Bad news: it’s
already out of print...

In Typo Veritas. John Denver’s
Ceefax obituary revealed a little-
known sf connection: that he was
famous for “soothing country-and-
western ballards.”

Logical. Letter in the Irish Times:
“Sir, I have just received a letter
bearing one of the new Dracula
stamps. The stamp has been franked
with the message: ‘Blood donors are
always needed’.”

Thog’s Masterclass. Dept of Real
Lit: “...She herself was unhurried, in
a crisp dress that made her edible
beauty cool without chill, like the
flesh of a melon. Her husband was
gracious and sculptural, gentle, even
soft, and yet immovable, imperish¬
able, as a granite monolith might be
that was carved in the likeness of a
tender and amiable god.” (Rebecca
West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,
1941-2)... “She has a face for the cor¬
ner, armored by hard-boiled eyes that
float in a sienna tea - a cold glare to
deny even the suggestion of complex
feelings.” (David Simon & Edward
Burns, The Corner, 1997)... “Madame
Avignon motioned me to sit on a
couch beside the dressing table with
twinkling eyes.” (Jane Routley, Mage
Heart, 1996)... “To use a pre-Holo-
caust term, Brickman was clearly a
hot potato - a vegetable that no one
in the Federation had tasted for nigh
on a thousand years.” (Patrick Tilley,
The First Family, 1986)... “‘Can I use
the bathroom?’ Stanley asked, his
bladder full of fear.” (Carl Huberman,
Eminent Domain, 1996)

February 1998

BOOKS

REVIEWED

magine,” says a Teller to his
J. flock, close to the end of Patrick
O’Leary’s The Gift (Tor, $22.95), “a
world without stories.” Imagine, he
says, our own world as it was before
the wizards bestowed upon us the
great gift of Story, making us into
people at last; imagine a world

Where everything was as it always was.
Where nothing new happened. Where
things just were. If this is difficult it is
because we have been so altered from
our animal nature that we cannot
imagine a world without endings, a
changeless world, a world of creatures
who only grew in canniness and never
in apprehension. Without their stories
we would have remained beasts: con¬
tent with survival, oblivious to death,
aloof to the possible, expecting nothing

And so on.

There is something odd here, of
course. It is not exactly new, in a fan¬
tasy context, to make poignant asser¬
tions (with which this reviewer
deeply concurs) about the power of
Story; and O’Leary is properly elo¬
quent. But at the same time, he fits
these wise apophthegms about Story
within a structure of explanation
which is very far from story-like:
Story (as the Teller tells the told of
the cast) is the gift the novel is all
about; it is a gift of the wizards.

As uttered here, perhaps amusedly,
this deprecatory presumption is a
totalizing claim very similar to those
found in the techno-occultism manu¬
als of Erich Von Daniken, a writer
who piously claims to exempt his
techno-occultism, which is doctrine,
from any hint of “fantasy,” which is
Story. So it is pretty dangerous for
O’Leary to suggest - as he does at
several points in his text - that the

— 54

come a man who tries “to take death
out of the world,” as in the third vol¬
ume of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea
books; and if he succeeds the magic -
the story - of the world will spoil.

But a Guardian will be born. Her
name will be Mother Death. She will
save you.

That is the end of the prologue. But
the Teller is not finished. He now
begins to recite a nest of tales, which
make up the body of the novel. A
young king is cursed with supernatu¬
ral hearing by an alchemist who has
discovered how to take death out of
the world, and who is now known as
the Usher of the Night. The young
king goes walkabout, and is rescued
by the boy Simon, who has learned to
ride the winds. Other stories intersect,
deepening and darkening the main
double-line of story. The Land dries
and rots. But eventually, the Usher is
defeated (by a humble woman whose
name will be Mother Death), green
comes again to the Land, the King is
cured; and all is well.

But then we return, via a circum¬
bendibus, to the ship. The Teller is
the boy Simon, now middle-aged.

More climaxes resolve elements of
the tale that seem to have been for¬
gotten. Marriages end the day.

Because so much of The Gift is told
as stories within stories, and because
so many of these inserted tales take
traditional forms, it is indeed possible
to read the book as an anthropologi¬
cal take on “primitive” apprehensions
of the world. The first wizard is a
crashed space captain, and the Usher
runs an agribusiness; and Story is
rumour. It is, in the end, a narrow
call. If we end being able to believe
the nest of stories as a fantasy - i.e.
as being true as far as the book can
know - it is because of the intricacies
of speed of the telling; the way
O’Leary’s prose flowers, suddenly, like
hard candy in a hot mouth. The
dance of delights of The Gift keep it
from Despite, but just. It is, in other
words, only the brilliance of The Gift
which keeps it from falling.

It would be a pleasure to pick what
one likes out of Nicholas Royle’s The
Matter of the Heart (Abacus, £9.99)
and run, but that would be grave-rob¬
bing. Out of a ragbag diversity of
material (some of it told from the
heart, like the segments dealing with
the death of the narrator’s father,
which read like raw autobiography),
Royle has jobbed together a most
extraordinarily absent text. It is like
notes to parts of a dozen novels not
yet written; it is not like a novel. Lots
of material visits sections of The Mat¬
ter of the Heart, but as there’s no
there there when the page is reached,
no gravity well to fix disjecta membra
into an organon, none of this material
stays to answer any questions.

Sure. This is deliberate. A prefa¬
tory quote from Robert Irwin’s

A Tale,
a Rail,
a Pogo

John Clute

wizards who create the world are in
fact ancient astronauts; because by
doing so he has risked creating a
nest of Stories which are, in the end,
little more than a pack of rumours
about the true shape of things.

I don’t think he wished to do this. I
don’t think he wished to create, in
The Gift, a novel whose fantasy
structure and telling was nothing
more than a rumour about the true sf
nature of the world; a novel which
could fit, without much finagling,
into David Brin’s Uplift sequence.
(How Brin manages to sidestep Von
Daniken is another story; an inter¬
esting one.) I was too won over by
O’Leary’s cunning nest of stories to
wish to think I should have best
understood that nest through a scrim
of dramatic irony, dolloped with
pathos; I did not wish to think of The
Gift as an exercise in cod anthropol¬
ogy, as though his protagonists were
aboriginals attempting to come to
terms with the new NASA base. I
think O’Leary was trying to write a
fantasy novel, a text whose truths
were embodied in the shape of the
tales which tell it. I think he almost
buggered it up.

But not quite.

The story is not simple, and circles
like snakes. A ship at sea snags a
naked woman in its nets. She is
dead. The Captain behaves oddly.

The Crew is transfixed. The Teller in
the bow of the ship, who has been
silent, begins to speak. In a few hun¬
dred words, like a jewelled incipit, he
lays down the novel to come; it is a
myth of origin. Tatoan, a wizard of
long ago, “the last of the great race
who fell out of the sky,” tells the peo¬
ple he has created that a great dan¬
ger will come to them. There will

Exquisite Corpse speaks of “tunnels
criss-crossing under the universe and
a sense of infinitely deep abysses
folding in upon themselves.” We are
cued: the world is a godgame but the
rules are Martian. There may be nar¬
rative connections and maps and
routes and intersections in The Mat¬
ter of the Heart, but each one of them
will be gapped by abyss; and the nar¬
rator - one of those ravaged, car-
obsessed, entropic epigones young
British writers seem to have
extracted holus-bolus but pig-igno¬
rant from the years of plague of M.
John Harrison - will find it his task
obsessively to pursue teasing
absences down the Martian Sphinx-
face passages of the world. Sure. We
know this.

But it simply does not work. Given
the material he needs to box into one
text - the autobiography mentioned
above; travel notes from America and
Australia; secret routes through the
heart of London; one gaslight-
romance era heart-transplant (quite
well done, in fact); sex acts to
describe (not so well); roman a clef
riffs to linger over; diseases to
demarcate; searches for the map
within the world to set off on - the
book is swamped; and comically, in
order to attempt to cope with all this
stuff, Royle ends up not with one
late-century floating protagonist
flashing his decoding ring around the
breakfast in the ruins, but four.

These are: the seemingly unem¬
ployed narrator with lots of money;
his friend Max, whose function in the
text is dizzyingly indistinguishable
from the narrator’s, though he gets
dismayingly less to do; Charlie, a
large American out of Le Carre,
whose prominence in the text almost
certainly depends upon Royle’s wish
to write about New Orleans; and
Danny, the small goateed rock-
climber with an ear problem who
lurks through Australia, chased by or
chasing the narrator - after having
kidnapped the narrator’s fab doctor
lover — like a grump Quilty.

Along the way there are hints of
Iain Sinclair’s London, mainly in the
palimpsesting of heart-linked events
in one room in a hospital near Hyde
Park Corner, which later becomes a
hotel; unearned tropes (like the use of
car fetishism as metonymy) from
Harrison, in addition to the use of his
body; an Australian character
straight out of J. G. Ballard; a distant
echo of Paul Bowles (I could have
misheard it); and more. The sf ele¬
ment lies in a century-long consan¬
guinity of hearts, metaphysical and
matter, focused on the hospital/hotel.
This consanguinity communicates
with the rest of the text, however, as
gap not suture. The matter of the
heart is, in the end, an absence.

Almost every page of this strange
undone book, all the same, as I
hinted earlier, has something to like.

There are observations, confessions,
surges of emotion, normalcies and
abysses, that make you like the nar¬
rator. Which is not the same as
agreeing with him (he’s in any case
very hard to separate from Royle,
who is the same age, and had the
same father, and almost certainly
took almost exactly the same inter¬
minable trip through Australia).

In the end, the book collapses
because it attempts to effect a sign-
change on various works of M. John
Harrison, the author whose own
work most conspicuously marks
these pages. A novel like Harrison’s
The Course of the Heart (1991) fas¬
tens its gaze upon a world that one
must religiously attempt to under¬
stand, so one can cut loose. It is a
world whose disjecta membra
threaten to connect, hence the cen¬
tripetal density of Harrison’s tales of
attempted, solitary escape. In The
Matter of the Heart, on the other
hand, the world threatens to
dissipate, hence the failed flustered

Nowhere but in the genre of sf could
a book like Tony Daniel’s Earthling
(Tor, $22.95) ever be published. It is a
fixup - a term this reviewer contin¬
ues to use despite pleas from writers
who think of it as pejorative; and
which may be defined as a text at
least some of whose component parts
were previously published, or could
have been published, as autonomous
tales. It does not matter whether or
not an author intended these parts to
make one final story; what matters is
the kind of narrative experience they
represent.

A fixup may come into being, delib¬
erately or post hoc, as a matter of
publishing expedience; there is noth¬
ing wrong in this, or particularly
interesting (though one might note
this sort of assembled text rarely
appears outside the sf field). More
interestingly, a fixup may, deliber¬
ately or post hoc, read as a structural
response to the challenge - always
central to serious sf - of represent¬
ing, and extrapolating upon, a vision
of the course of history. Fixups of the
greatest interest are fly-eye snap¬
shots of history. Like time-travel sto¬
ries, though far more vitally, or
haiku, they are a body English of the
workings of Time.

Earthling is not the best fixup ever
written - Walter M. Miller’s A Canti¬
cle for Leibowitz (1960) is probably
still the supreme example - but it’s a
reputable working out of the virtues
(and some of the deficiencies) of the
form. We begin around the turn of
the century. A mining robot gradu¬
ally (and implausibly) gains con¬
sciousness, a process intensified
when the mind of an impassioned,
newly-dead geologist is fed into the
mix. Ecological supremacists domi¬
nate the Pacific north-west region
this amalgam haunts; and Orf (the
robot eventually names itself after
Orpheus) goes underground, where
he/it/they begin to encounter “ter-
ranes” 60 miles underground. Ter-
ranes - we learn 200 pages later -
may be extraterrestrials hatched
from eggs lodged beneath Antarctica;
or they may be Gaia flakes; or desig¬
nated drivers for the apprehension of
the aesthetic sublime which shapes
the universe in Earthling.

Lots of stuff. A “normal” novel
would continue with it. Earthling,
however, is a fixup. In the next sec¬
tion, we leap 200 years further on,
enter the story of an aberrant forest
ranger named Jarrod, follow him (for
most of the rest of the book) through

tour-bus gestures at garnering that
signal the text’s true lack of a
longed-for cohesion; in this book,
the world wears the aspect of a
club to be joined. For M. John Har¬
rison the world is a hell we must
anatomize, in order to gain our free¬
dom; for Nicholas Royle it is an initi¬
ation rite.

February 1998

IPhS an orthodox (though far more heav-
/ ily sexed than hitherto) post-catas-
: trophe hegira through the usual
(“fviEWEoi bevy of balkanized statelets.

Finally there is a big earthquake.
Orf hardly makes an appearance in
all this.

The final section, many years fur¬
ther on, gathers terranes, variously
evolved humans, and an attendant
Orf together to discuss the possibility
that an ftl object called the Chunk

may mean harm to Earth. (Rather as
in Daniel’s earlier Warpath [1993],
folk travel between the stars by men¬
tal effort, or through dreams, or
something similar; and lots of these
starfarers via dream also horn in.) At
novel’s end, it’s not known exactly
what the Chunk may portend - it
may, in fact, be a connoisseur. Or a
strip developer. Whatever it is, the
text stops, but the fixup-hoodedness
of the tale carries the reader, tran-

scendentalized, forward and upward
and outward and away.

There are delights and mild silli¬
nesses throughout Earthling, which
is a bit pogostick; and a sense that
only here - only in a literature whose
list of characters includes the world-
through-time - could such a farrago
of gaps ever be found. Fixups are the
footprints of the world going on.
Earthling hops that way.

John Clute

E t’s get small - very small, that is,
as in nanotechnology, the magic
dust chock full of little factories no
bigger than bacteria, that, working
on a molecular scale (a nanometre is
a millionth of a millimetre), could
theoretically manufacture anything
from a slab of beef to a Volkswagen
using only a solution of the appropri¬
ate chemicals. And since we’re not
much more than colonies of millions
of tiny bags of chemicals, nanotech¬
nology could transform us too,
change our bodies or change our
minds. It’s a powerful trope utilized
in dozens of recent sf novels, includ¬
ing Kathleen Ann Goonan’s first
novel, Queen City Jazz (reviewed in
IZ 91). Mississippi Blues (Tor,
$25.95), is a sequel that deepens the
vision of the first in a fresh take on
that old sf standard, the post-catas¬
trophe picaresque.

The familiar landscape of the Ameri¬
can mid-West has been transformed
and partitioned by the Information
Wars, and is populated by people
enslaved to the past by ideas (or
memes) transmitted by nanotechnol¬
ogy. Some have been engulfed by whole
personalities, from the greats of blues
music to (since the voyage is down the
Mississippi on a riverboat) Mark
Twain. The whole of America has
become a Disneyland with no exits.

A long, somewhat clumsy, but nec¬
essary prologue eases us into the
complex story begun in Queen City
Jazz. In that novel, Verity, an orphan
raised by a community of Quakers
who tried to exclude nanotechnology
from their lives, travelled to the city
of Cincinnati, where she discovered
that she was a clone of the woman
who held its population in thrall.

Like all cities after the Information
Wars, when broadcast signals ceased
to work, Cincinnati was a fortress in
which information was transmitted
through complex pheromones regu¬
lated by nano-manufactured Bees
and Flowers. Verity destroyed her
original, rebooted the city and freed
its people, driving them out by infect¬
ing them with a meme that made
them want to travel downriver
towards the fabled city of Norleans.

Mississippi Blues tells how Verity
shepherds her charges to their desti¬
nation with the help of Blaze, a fel¬
low Quaker murdered by the
community’s leader and resurrected

Let’s

Get

Small

Paul J. McAuley

through nanotechnology, and a cast
of misfits picked up along the way.
Verity discovers that she is pregnant
by a lover she met in Cincinnati;
Blaze is able to rebuild his identity
by becoming a blues musician; it
slowly becomes clear that the Infor¬
mation Wars are far from over.

It is a hectic, congested and at first
seemingly unfocused narrative, but
our attention is held by Goonan’s
detailed and gloriously inventive
depiction of remnants of a civiliza¬
tion hypnotized by the past, from a
pleasure island run by sinister,
Circe-like clowns to the city of Mem¬
phis, enslaved by its Bees. A charla¬
tan in self-repairing clothes carries a
kit of nanotechnology that is the ulti¬
mate in cure-all potions; different
manifestations of Mark Twain argue
over the nature of the world and the
true spirit of mankind.

The blues are the thread which
binds the narrative. Just as they
were originally the music of a people
freed from slavery yet still chained
by awful circumstance, so here they
echo the travails of people trying to
escape from a history in which nan¬
otechnology now has a manifesto of
its own, and control has passed from
human hands. Slowly and stealthily,
Goonan reveals that apparently ran¬
dom incidents are all part of a care¬
fully structured story about the
getting of wisdom. Two of the passen¬
gers picked up along the way turn
out to be agents whose roles reveal
crucial facts about the nature of the
catastrophe; after Verity is infected
with capitalism in Memphis, a doctor
sees her reaction to Blazes’s blues
and realizes that the tyranny of nan¬
otechnology can be overcome; and the
real reason behind the collapse of
communications is revealed,

although as something of an
afterthought whose implications are
not fully worked out - perhaps there
will be a third novel in the series.

With lyrical yet scientifically liter¬
ate renderings of the miracles and
terrors of nanotechnology, Goonan
presents a landscape fertile with pos¬
sibility and drenched in a strange
and terrible history, yet she never
loses sight of the human stories
which inhabit it. The plot is wrenched
from the heart of sf and transformed,
like the landscape through which
Verity and her ship of fools travel, in
startling ways. With only her third
novel, Goonan has established herself
as a strong and original voice.

J ohn W. Campbell, Jr., said dispar¬
agingly that his own early stories
"... were loaded with 500 words of
action, 2000 words of hypothetical
technology, 500 words of action, 1000
words of science, 500 words of
action...” He didn’t know it, but he
had stumbled upon the ideal formula
for a technothriller, and the ideal
description of Bart Kosko’s Nan¬
otime (Avon, $24). While Goonan
embeds her information in her char¬
acters and the landscape through
which they travel, Kosko is more
upfront: every deployment of a bit of
tech kit leads to a dizzying disquisi¬
tion on its function and the science
behind it.

It’s 2030. The oil is running out. A
Sufi terrorist, Hamid Tabriz, is
fomenting war in the Middle East.
John Grant has invented a revolution¬
ary molecule which splits hydrogen
from water, guaranteeing cheap and
virtually unlimited energy but mak¬
ing him the target of Tabriz, who can
replace his victims’ brains with chips
carrying his own personality. Grant’s
fiancee is converted by Tabriz; Grant
kills her when she tries to assassinate
him, is captured by the US secret ser¬
vice, and then rescued by the Israelis,
with whom he has been working.
Except they then replace his brain
with a chip, so he can confront Tabriz
in nanotime, at the speed at which
computer processors operate.

The narrative is fast-paced, but
Grant has little to do until the climax
except be tortured. And the great
chunks of persuasively detailed expo¬
sition leave little space for such
niceties as character development,

especially as, like most techno¬
thrillers, Nanotime promiscuously
deploys a huge cast at whim to speed
along its carelessly plotted story.

As a result, we can’t much care for
Grant, who is in any case an unpleas¬
ant character in unpleasant times.

He is marrying for money, and seems
to want to deploy his invention only
to earn enough to buy himself out of
the free-market hell of the future
USA, where everyone is continually
monitored and automatically fined for
the slightest transgression. In other
words, those smart and rich enough
can opt out of the society they helped
create, and the rest must suffer the
consequences. Bart Kosko is an
expert in Fuzzy Logic and professor
of electrical engineering at the Uni¬
versity of Southern California. Maybe
Nanotime works best as an awful
warning about the agenda of those
who promise to shape the future.

W e all know how history repeats
itself, and Connie Willis’s To
Say Nothing of the Dog (Bantam,
$23.95) precisely fits the saw, for this
hectic farce is a sequel to her time¬
travelling tragedy Doomsday Book.

We start, as in Willis’s story “Fire
Watch,” in an English cathedral, at
the height of the Blitz, but here it is
Coventry rather than St Paul’s. A
bunch of time-travellers from Oxford
University’s history department, led
by Ned Henry, are scouring the newly
bumt-out ruin for a Victorian mon¬
strosity known as the bishop’s bird
stump (its exact nature is a wonderful
joke I won’t reveal). They need to copy
the bishop’s bird stump so that an
exact replica of Coventry Cathedral
can be completed to the satisfaction of
Oxford University’s eccentric and bel¬
licose benefactress, Lady Shrapnell.
Unfortunately, for a reason that later
gains importance, the self-regulating
space-time continuum which binds
history makes it is impossible for
them to arrive before the air-raid.

They return without finding the
bishop’s bird stump, and although
Ned is suffering from time-lag he
must plunge back to Victorian Oxford
to return a cat (cats are extinct in his
era) rescued from drowning by
another time-traveller, the lovely Ver¬
ity Kindle. Dazed and confused, Ned
is plunged into a comedy of errors.

The cat’s rescue threatens to undo the
course of history, and Ned and Verity’s
attempts to straighten things out
seem only to exacerbate the problem.
The meeting of a Victorian young lady
with her future husband is threat¬
ened; incongruities in the flow of time,
which prevent visits to significant
moments of history, threaten to trap
every time-traveller in the past.

It is not an original plot (it was
used to good effect in the first of
Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future
film trilogy), but the complications
and confusions of mistaken identity,
- February 1998 -

misapprehension and Ned’s blunder¬
ing through Victorian mores are
expertly handled, evoking classic
English detective fiction, P. G. Wode-
house and, of course, Jerome K.
Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, to Say
Nothing of the Dog. Ned remains
something of a cipher, but Connie
Willis marshals around him a busy
cast of deftly drawn eccentrics, spiri¬
tualists, bounders and Victorian
maidens, and her vision of the more
monstrous aspects of the late Victo¬
rian age is bracing and detailed
(although I’m pretty sure no English
railway customarily boasted Western-
style carriages with observation plat¬
forms at their rear), and rendered
with an acute sense of the absurd.

Although billed as sf, the science is
non-existent; just how the space-time
continuum regulates itself (is it self-
aware, or does it respond to a First
Cause?), other than as a convenient
plot device, is never explained. But
that’s to miss the point. Like Tim
Powers’s The Anubis Gates, To Say
Nothing of the Dog deploys the sf
theme of time travel to drive its plot
rather than to explore cosmological or
quantum cosmological implications.
And the plot, interlaced with inge¬
nious discourses on the role of contin¬
gency and chaos in the course of
history, is a cat’s cradle that does at
last neatly unravel: the identity of the
husband turns nicely on the strictures
of the 1930s detective novels of which
Verity is enamoured, as does the mys¬
tery of how the continuum cured itself
of temporal hiccups. A delight.

J ohn Kessel’s recent time-travel
novel Corrupting Dr Nice
(reviewed in IZ 120) borrowed a twist
invented by Bruce Sterling and Lew
Shiner: you do not travel back to your
own past but instead to one of a myr¬
iad moment universes which immedi¬
ately split off from the main track
upon your arrival. Since there are

137.04 moment universes per sec¬
ond, the past can be plundered
without remorse. Two short stories
set in the same universe bookend
Kessel’s sort-of-second short-story
collection The Pure Product (Tor,
$23.95), half of which (although not,
oddly, the fine Nebula Award-winning
fantasy “Another Orphan”) was previ¬
ously published in Meeting in Infinity
by the small press imprint, Arkham
House.

In most of these stories, sf tropes
are deployed not as extrapolation
from or exploration of scientific
truths, but to furnish satires or alle¬
gories, and a number suggest that
Kessel is deeply uneasy with the
notion of sf in any form. “Invaders”
interweaves two narrative strands -
the conquest of the Incas by the
Spanish in search of gold, and the
conquest of Earth by aliens in search
of cocaine - with a third in which
Kessel himself comments on the
story and likens sf to delusional
escapism, much like a drug. And like
any addict too weak to resist what he
really despises, Kessel too often sinks
into self-loathing. In “The Pure Prod¬
uct,” which echoes Cyril Kornbluth’s
classic “The Little Black Bag,” sci¬
ence overwhelms all that is good
(that is, literature and art), leading
to a population of amoral but
omnipotent vandals who travel back
to our own era to cause mayhem.
Escapism, as in “A Clean Escape,” is
comforting but only at a terrible
price. The narrator trapped in the
dream-like parable of “Buddha Nos¬
tril Bird” tells us that “Unlike a sci¬
entist ... I could explain that some
truths are eternal and ought to be
held inviolate, and why a culture
that accepts change indiscriminately
is rotten at its heart.” Eternal truths
in a late 20th-century sf story? It’s
like stumbling across a passionate
case for mesmerism in The Lancet.

But even when they are excoriating
the very genre which they notionally
inhabit, the stories are finely written
and polish their points to a nicety.

And when Kessel stops trying to write
across the grain of the genre, he is
very good indeed. “Faustfeathers”
(originally a short story collected in
Meeting in Infinity, presented here as
a play) reinterprets the myth of Faust
as by the Marx Brothers, and joyously
runs away with itself. “The Fran¬
chise,” an alternate history of baseball
in which George Herbert Walker Bush
must face the most fearsome pitcher
of the season, Fidel Castro, works
both as a nicely turned allegory and
as an homage to the myths of USA’s
inscrutable national sport.

And in the two stories related to
Corrupting Dr Nice, Kessel has found
a form of sf in which he is able to
deploy his formidable talents without
self-scourging guilt. “Some Like It
Cold” is a bleak fable in which the
amoral time-traveller Detlev Gruber

Ws

rescues Marilyn Monroe from sui¬
cide, caused by her despair at
being exploited for her sexuality.
Briefly, Gruber is touched by her
plight: "... I had a sudden sense of
her as a real person, a grown woman
in a lot of trouble.” But his greed
overcomes his scruples and he per¬
suades her to travel with him to the
future, where he knows that she will
be exploited all over again. Only at
the last are we allowed to see that
Gruber’s pity is real rather than a
reflex. “The Miracle of Ivar Avenue,”
the best story in the collection, is
more openly redemptive. It’s set a
scrupulously furnished late 1940s,
and told from the point of view of a
Los Angeles detective. The body of
the film director Preston Sturges is
found washed up on a beach (in reality
- our reality - Sturges committed
suicide in a carbon monoxide-filled
garage), yet Sturges is alive and well,
ready to restart his career sifter crip¬
pling setbacks. The solution to the
mystery involves time travel and
Detlev Gruber, makes some sharp
points about character and the
absurdities of destiny, and allows the
detective to make his own peace with
personal tragedy.

These later stories show Kessel
able to relax within the parameters
of the genre. They show him stretch¬
ing perceived restrictions rather
than raging against them. They show
just how good he can be.

L ike many of his short stories, Paul
J Di Filippo’s first novel, Ciphers
(Cambrian Publications/Permeable
Press, $16.95), brilliantly evokes the
USA’s counter-culture, where the wild
fringes of sf and other pulp genres,
rock’n’roll, comix and conspiracy the¬
ory promiscuously miscegenate. This
big, baggy novel alternates a kind of
post-Pynchon secret history of the
20th century with a free-wheeling
contemporary narrative in which a
slacker record-store clerk, Cy
Prothero, searches for his lost girl¬
friend, who was working for the mys¬
terious Wu Laboratories. Cy falls in
with his girlfriend’s best friend Polly,
who is looking for her disappeared
boyfriend, and pretty soon they’re
embroiled with each other and with a
worldwide conspiracy which aims to
achieve enlightenment and total con¬
trol of time and information.

Like all conspiracy theories,
Ciphers invokes a paranoid semiosis
by which everything is connected to
everything else, thus rendering all
connections equally valid or equally
meaningless. But Di Filippo turns
this failing into a game, its playful
rearrangement of the meaning of
recent history revolving around a
conflation of information theory and
molecular biology (the latter, in about
the only serious thesis of the novel, is
held to be a branch of information
theory; our DNA is a cipher of our¬
selves, or maybe vice versa). Pep¬
pered with snatches from rock lyrics

(sometimes seamlessly, sometimes
not: so it goes), it is by turns sexy,
hectic, penetrating, daft, infuriating
and funny. Although its ending com¬
pletely unravels, as if Di Filippo
could not work out or could not be
bothered to work out how to round
up all the hares he set in motion, at
the same time it sends up the genre
it pretends to inhabit.

As Cy complains, “It’s not even a
proper conspiracy! There’s no stealth,
there’s no ideology, there’s no
attempt at secrecy, there’s no organi¬
zation! There’s not even any obvious
damn goals! A million schemes just
seem to be at cross-purposes with the
other half! It’s not mechanistic, it’s —
it’s organic! It’s a big funky soup!”
Sometimes overcooked, and with per¬
haps too many ingredients stirred
into the mix, Di Filippo’s soup may
be an acquired taste, but if you’re
familiar with his dense and deft
short stories, you will know that it is
also addictive.

A correction. In the review of Dan
Simmons’s The Rise ofEndymion (IZ
124), the fourth and last novel in the
series which began with Hyperion, I
conflated the title of the third novel,
Endymion, with the second, The Fall
of Hyperion. And some readers may
not know that The Hyperion Cantos
is Simmons’ preferred overall title for
the first two books in the series.
Apologies.

Paul J. McAuley

I reviewed the first three volumes of
Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth”
series in Interzone s 90, 103 & 119. If
you have those numbers you can
refresh your memory; if you haven’t,
they’re still in print and contain
other (and some might say yet
greater) goodies than my columns.

The American publisher makes
two claims for Temple of the Winds
(Tor, $26.95; Millennium, £17.99),
the fourth volume. The first is that
Goodkind has not only sustained his
level as a writer but enhanced it. I’m
unable to support that, mainly
because either he or (I suspect) his
editor has decided to continue with
the many ungainly datadumps which
so disfigured the second and third
volumes. Moreover, although some of
his ideas are interesting, notably the
contingent character of the prophe¬
cies which impel the plot and the
special powers of the Mother Confes¬
sor, both have already appeared;
apart from an expansion of the inter¬
esting and original qualities of the
ab-human called sliph, nothing of
great substance is added here.

On the debit side, Goodkind contin¬
ues to overdo the high-minded con¬
versation and his choice of names for
minor characters remains inept —
this book features one called Clive
Anderson. Moreover, the relationship

Stand

Alone?

Chris Gilmore

between Richard, Kahlen and the
partially reformed Mord Sith has
come to resemble a sitcom, mainly
thanks to the advent of Nadine, a
pushy ex-girlfriend of Richard’s. This
is exacerbated by the indefensible
decision of Richard and Kahlen not
to engage in further sexual relations
until they are formally married
according to the rites of the Mud Peo¬
ple, as it would upset some prudish
old retainers. The notion that a rul¬
ing couple should offer a moral exam¬
ple to their subjects appears to have
passed them by - curiously, given the
hypertrophied sense of duty under

which both labour — but it serves a
contrivance later in the book.

Richard and Kahlen continue their
struggle with the Dreamwalker, First
Wizards Zedd and Nathan are still
out of contact, the fear of betrayal is
as strong as ever. Goodkind’s sus¬
pense-writing, and his portrayal of
terror, grief and desolation, are as
good as ever; on this occasion he
achieves some sort of first by having
his heroine raped, and not by mere
accident but with the connivance of
his hero - and all in the line of duty.
To bring that off is an extraordinary
achievement, but he still lowers the
tone disastrously whenever he gets
bored: “but somehow being in the
Wizard’s Keep after dark seemed
somehow worse.” The text is littered
with literally hundreds of such small
solecisms - inexcusably so, because
anyone with an attentive ear could
have put them right.

The second claim, which I presume
the datadumps are supposed to sup¬
port, is that the book can be read as a
stand-alone novel. That I dispute
even more strongly; granted, each
volume so far has ended with a break
in the fighting, but by now some
overall structure is beginning to
emerge. A story of this kind must end
either in catastrophe or with the sur¬
viving good guys living more-or-less

58

happily ever after; The Sword of
Truth is an n-volume novel, not a
Greek-prefixed -logy, so there’s no
point whatever in buying this fourth
book if you haven’t already enjoyed
the other three. As to whether it’s
your own dish of tea, Goodkind is a
writer of some pretention, which
means that he can afford nothing
slapdash. What will do at a pinch for
Collin Webber or Craig Shaw Gard¬
ner will not do here. Beyond that, I
dislike repeating myself; read my
notices of the earlier volumes, which
are all in print in A-format.

W riting in Foundation, Jennifer
Swift observed (of a novel which
shall remain nameless here) that “It
takes talent to write a truly bad
book.” Larry S. Friedman, who
designed Peter Crowther’s latest
anthology, Destination Unknown
(White Wolf, $12.99), evidently has
talent of a similar order. Douglas
Winter’s cover illustration is perfunc¬
tory, the typeface is undistinguished,
the prelims are crowded and messy,
the running heads are hideous,
affected and wasteful. Even the blurb
is calculated to make enemies; it
boasts contributions by seven named
writers, including Alan Dean Foster,
Charles de Lint and Lisa Tuttle plus
I nine, implicitly lesser-light “others.”

I As the latter include Ian Watson, Ian
McDonald and Christopher Fowler
the system employed eludes me.

But once inside the covers, and
past Anne McCaffrey’s largely auto¬
biographical introduction, the initial
bad impression rapidly dissipates.

We have here a collection of contem¬
porary fantasy, heavily but not exclu¬
sively slanted to dark surrealism,
and very conservative in tone.

I There’s an excellent example of R. A.
Lafferty on top form, but it’s the Laf-
ferty of Nine Hundred
I Grandmothers-, Terry Dowling’s “The
Maiden Death” recalls early Delany
in style, and gives the impression of
having been yanked from the middle
of something rather fine, while Storm
Constantine’s contribution would
have fitted seamlessly into Brian
Aldiss’s The Airs of Earth. Even Ian
McDonald has returned to the Mars
of Desolation Road. Christopher
Fowler contributes a blackly comic
exploration of sick-building syn¬
drome, and Michael Libling’s “A Bite
to Eat in Abbotsford” is gruesomely
funny and meticulously observed.

No one here writes badly, though
not all the stories are well con¬
structed. Kathleen Goonan’s is worst
in that regard - a sketchy beginning
followed by a splurge of happy end¬
ings with no intervening middle. Is
this an example of the “feelgood writ¬
ing” one hears about? I was still wait¬
ing for De Lint’s to reveal its point
when it ended abruptly, while Wat¬
son’s and Foster’s petered out rather
than concluding. After a promising

start, James Lovegrove’s ending was
simply weak. Lisa Tuttle’s story read
like the opening chapter of a twin-
worlds romance that didn’t quite gel
- surprisingly, since the foundation
seems solid enough and there are sev¬
eral obvious lines of development.
Perhaps she should have a further
word with Crowther - competent edi¬
tors are thin on the ground...

None of the other stories, by Jeremy
Dyson, Bentley Little, Tom Shippey
and Ramsey Campbell, displayed such
defects, but they all covered over¬
familiar ground - the curse of generic
writing, and of reviewers; those who
have read less them I will like them
better. Still, with six superb hits and
no bad prose, this is a superior collec¬
tion. I hope it finds a UK publisher,
but whoever buys it must have it reset
if it’s to be taken seriously. That
shouldn’t cost much; a timid amateur
with a basic DTP package could do an
infinitely better job than Friedman.
And while they’re at it, the intro adds
nothing to the book or McCaffrey’s
reputation. I’m sure Crowther could
do a lot better himself.

I am just old enough to remember
the vogue for the romances of
Georgette Heyer. Set mainly in the
Regency period, they featured hand¬
some, blue-blooded, slightly
debauched gallants and plucky young
ladies of humbler birth who often
found it necessary to dress up as
boys, the better to protect their
virtue while getting their share of
the action. They were good, clean,
unpretentious fun, but up to now I
knew of only one attempt to revive
the genre as fantasy: Freda Warring¬
ton’s A Taste of Blood Wine. That
book is heavily cut with other influ¬
ences, but Patricia C. Wrede offers
the unadulterated McCoy, with the
trifling difference that hers is an
alternative world where magic
works. Her current offering, Magi¬
cian’s Ward (Tor, $22.95) catches

the atmosphere well enough,
though her evocations of period
upper-class slang and thieves’ cant t\>
are unconvincing and a touch T^i
repetitive - too many coves, toffs
and culls below decks, too few French
catchphrases above.

The anachronistically named Kim,
a juvenile delinquent now coming on
nicely into womanhood, has had the
good fortune to be taken up by
Mairelon, a well connected wizard of
some note. That entails being
launched into Society, trained as a
wizard (here the term covers both
sexes - a change from all those male
witches, I suppose) and involved in
the various intrigues which are a
part of his inheritance. All these are
described from Kim’s viewpoint with
enough vigour and good humour to
excuse the absence of any sense of
danger or very much narrative
thrust until over halfway through.

Thereafter the pace quickens, with
Kim forced by circumstance to pitch
her immature and largely untried
powers against both a sinister, hid¬
den enemy and the pitiless standards
of the Upper Crust. The resolution is
neatly constructed (though it offers
no surprises), and unlike Goodkind’s
books it stands alone well enough. I
gather that it’s a sequel to her earlier
Mairelon the Magician which, were I
many years younger, I might well
seek out. As it is ... how this one
comes to be marketed as an adult
novel I’ve no idea; you could try it on
children up to 14, or as a first thera¬
peutic step for someone who desires
to be weaned away from Mills &

Boon onto serious literature.

And definitely for adults only... My
Xiiavourite among all Wilde’s epi¬
grams states that “Sincerity in art is
largely a matter of talent.” My own
corollary is that the same goes with
knobs on for acceptability in sex¬
writing. Nothing is more dreary than
ill-produced porn, but to write it with
charm, grace and above all wit is a
challenge which many writers of the
top rank have refused to take up - no
doubt wisely aware of their limita¬
tions.

Robert Irwin has chosen to take it
up with Prayer-Cushions of the
Flesh (Dedalus, £6.99), a fantasy set,
not in the real Ottoman Istanbul but
in Istanbul as conceived by Ingres
(whose Grande Odalisque or Turkish
Bath would have furnished a better
cover illustration than the relevant
but rather lacklustre Jules Migonney
[who he?]). The story, such as it is,
exists purely to display its own orna¬
mentation, so searchers after deep
psychological truths will be disap¬
pointed. It concerns Prince Orkhan,
one of Sultan Selim’s many sons, who
has passed the years from five to 20 in
the Cage at the Heart of the Imperial
Harem. There he has been chronically
bored, with nothing to do and no com-

xuary 1998

pany but eunuchs and his half-
brothers, with whom he has
engaged in sodomy very much as a
pis alter.

One day his fortunes change
for the better, as he is led out of the
Cage, not to immediate strangulation
with a silken bowstring (as might
reasonably be expected) but to suc¬
ceed his father as sultan; but he
quickly discovers that as sultan he is
no autocrat, nor even a figurehead,

but the powerless pet of the Harem.
His orders are ignored, he himself
must defer to the whims of everyone
he meets (most irksomely, to a
dwarfish buffoon), and though sex is
made plentifully available to him, it
is invariably on terms set by the lady.
As the ladies are all barking mad
(probably), possessed of extraordinary
notions (certainly) and incorrigibly
talkative thereupon, Orkhan finds his
situation palls rapidly. Moreover, it is

a situation of appalling danger, offer¬
ing little prospect of escape save by
means of one or other of the fancy
deaths on offer.

So how does he cope? Suffice it to
say that the ending is highly satisfac¬
tory, and entirely in the spirit of the
1001 Nights. There’s even a moral,
though of no great profundity - and
in a bare 140 pages of largish type,
who could as for more?

Chris Gilmore

T here are those who understand
the work of Iain Sinclair. Not
those who crease their foreheads
while reading him and reward them¬
selves with a cup of tea at the end of
every paragraph. Nor the people
who, every now and then, think: “Yes,
got that...” Reading Sterne’s Tris¬
tram Shandy is akin to following the
author around the rooms in his own
head and finding fresh delights in
each. But Sinclair’s imagination is
not best described in terms of rooms,
however large they might be. Inter¬
preting his prose is like watching for
tectonic plates to shift and re-settle.
The failure to connect with what Sin¬
clair would call an author’s psycho¬
geography is a terrible admission,
and had I not been reviewing Slow
Chocolate Autopsy (Phoenix House,
£9.99) I might have closed it and
saved it for a rainy day. But to take a
quote out of context, “you don’t have
to understand him to dig him.”

The book is far from being a linear
narrative. It’s a London fantasy, but
the quest is vague (not least for those
involved) which makes a synopsis
nigh-on impossible. The most impor¬
tant character is Norton, although
(paradoxically) the best chapters are
those in which he is a rumour, a
whisper. (“Who said Norton exists?
There’s no record of him.”) Norton is
present during certain moments in
London’s history. He can move
through time but cannot leave the
confines of the city: “He gets the first
dangerous whiff of Epping Forest and
starts to lose his shape. These ter¬
races can hardly be called London. A
couple more miles and Norton would
be a smear of gas.” The freedom of
movement through time, of course, is
an idea that Kurt Vonnegut used in
Slaughterhouse Five, and the notion
of a character’s apparent ubiquity
has been explored by Woody Allen in
Zelig and Tom Waits on “Black
Wings.” But Sinclair’s collaborative
book is like none of the above. We
witness the interdependency between
Norton and London, and Norton and
the other characters - even the gang¬
ster, Jack the Hat.

It’s a dense read: less than 200
pages long, but rich - like chocolate
itself. Sinclair’s brevity has much to
do with the fact that he’s a poet. One-
and two-word sentences are not
uncommon in Slow Chocolate

Psycho¬

geographies

David Mathew

Autopsy. You have to bite into the
words to taste the flavour that comes
out. Similarly, Sinclair offers up rich
and startling descriptive phrases:
“Lips to inspire a Dali sofa. Lips that
could shovel snow.” Or: “Like the rest
of us, he takes the dictation of his
controllers. This is a zone of electro¬
magnetic privilege. These buildings
generate paranoia. That’s their only
purpose” - which hints at the influ¬
ence of William Burroughs, and in
whose book Junky a character called
Norton is also present. (Burroughs,
furthermore, appears as a character
in Autopsy.)

Paranoia is one of Sinclair’s main
themes (“Paranoia is knowing more
than you can use”) and to help the
author, Dave McKean (given equal
star-billing) provides the artwork for
the comic-book sections. These are
some of the closest depictions of the
fragmentary nature of nightmare
that this reviewer has seen. But
there is humour too - briefly. Or
more accurately, perhaps, it could be
described as nervous laughter. A reli¬
gious crusader is “a tambourine
shaker. From Salt Lake City or wher¬
ever... A come-on girl backing a mar¬
garine-haired messiah.” Or: “it had
her purring like a coyote on heat in a
truckstop corral.” But even this levity
is soon drowned in fertile moribund
imagery.

A brilliant mind in the body of an
author surely has three choices.

Anthony Burgess’s approach was to
distil his intelligence into easily-
assimilated narratives, however chal¬
lenging the subject matter. He was
an entertainer. Georges Perec’s
approach was to write an example of
every existing literary form so that
he would not get bored. He was an
entertainer-artist. Iain Sinclair has
chosen to be an artist, if the concept
of choice is even present. The reader
will need to work. This is a chewy
text, written with pith and pluck and
gumption. Recommended.

Also containing a real-life writer (or
II several) in a fictional setting is
S. P. Somtow’s Darker Angels (Gol-
lancz, £16.99). At the end of the first
chapter Walt Whitman shows up,
greeted by the prissy widow of a late
reverend as follows: “You’re some
kind of poet; a bad one, if truth were
told. Very modem, if you please; no
rhyme and little reason...” Somtow
goes on to use Whitman, Lord Byron
and Poe, not to mention Abraham
Lincoln, as a much larger part of the
main plot than Sinclair does with
Burroughs. Some might say as too
large a part, for this type of intertex- I
tual shenanigan - this rewriting of I
history for no obvious point whatever
- is always a hit-or-miss affair.

One misgiving is in the choice of
multiple narrators and the retro-
chronological plotline. We begin in
1865, at the death of a religious abo¬
litionist of slavery: Reverend
Grainger. His widow begins, detailing
some sudden bad behaviour by their
black slave, Phoebe. Why is Phoebe
playing up? Enter Whitman to take a
turn at narrating, and then his lover,
Zachary Brown. Horror being a genre
in which the events of the book’s pre¬
sent are usually the results of seeds
sown before, the book goes back to
1864. Brown talks about the Civil
War and the ugliness of slavery; he
also describes a were-leopard that
will have a dramatic influence on the
plot. But the events of 1865 have not
yet been explained, so further back
in time the book goes. In tales of a
one-eyed shaman (who gave his
other, like Odin, for the acquisition of
knowledge) and in the travelogue
from the Land of the Dead, the
reader gets a glimpse of how African
leopard cults, and zombies, have
affected the events of 1865. The prob-

60

lem is, by now we have forgotten how
to care. For the time capsule is still
moving backwards. To explain the
findings in 1863 we jump back to
1806, and so on. It’s hard to believe
that we will return to 1865. It all
seems forced and aimless. The plot
itself is in a therapist’s chair,
engaged in a stint of hypnotic regres¬
sion; each voice is idiosyncratic and a
law unto itself.

However, it would be unfair to sug¬
gest that Darker Angels is a bad
book. Although there are dollops of
old-fashioned horror fare - the sex¬
ual temptation of the religious; virgin
births — there are some pleasantly
winsome hoity-toity chapter head¬
ings that underplay the chapters’
intentions (“Wherein Mrs Grainger
becomes steadily more discomfited by
fresh revelations”), and the snooty
Mrs Grainger, who wants to know
why her husband died, is fresh. As a
lapsed Christian she claims: “I am no
mawkish juvenile, to be deceived by
ghost stories and tales of hoodoo...”
and the better scenes involve the re-
evaluations of her faith. There are
shocks every bit as harsh as those
pertaining to the supernatural. Mrs
Grainger receives a letter from the
reverend that Phoebe has been hid¬
ing, saying: “like me, my dear, you
have always really been agnostic... he
who adheres to the gospels as though
we still dwelt in the Dark Ages is a
fool...”

The descriptions of the nature of
zombies (“we calls them les zombis. It
from a Kikongo word nzambi that
mean a dead man that walk the
earth”) and the angel with the hun¬
dred eyes are well written. The zom¬
bies trying to sing while using stolen
body-parts as musical instruments
shows grim humour. But the main
messages of the novel are concerned
with liberty and intolerance. When
Zachary Brown, for example, says
“Why, there weren’t many trades a
woman was good for, and what call
would there be for a darkie lady of
the night?” we witness a triple
whammy of stylized prejudices. A
homosexual man (1) highlighting
both the lowly statuses of women (2)
and of Blacks (3). Somtow gets to the
heart of times by numerous refer¬
ences, thus: “Would Negroes be
attending our dinner parties and
soirees, even using our waterclosets
and teacups? The prospect was none
too comforting.” It is brave in its
ambition, but ultimately a book that
once closed will remain so. Superfi¬
cially, even the title is poor after The
Pavilion of Frozen Women, or
Vanitas.

F reda Warrington’s Dracula the
Undead (Penguin, £5.99) also
has characters already known to the
reader. And characters who are writ¬
ers - at least in the sense that they
were fictional people in Bram

Stoker’s original Dracula, present
now (as then) to offer their pixels in
the form of journal-entries and let¬
ters. It’s a sequel, set seven years on
from the final scenes of Stoker’s book,
the Dracula legend being as difficult
to kill as the bloodsucker himself.
Using the same epistolary method (of
which the Victorians were so fond),
Warrington has fashioned an enjoy¬
able addition to the mythos.

And most of the old gang are pre¬
sent, although not necessarily alive.
In a group, Jonathan and Mina
Harker return to Buda-Pesth and
Transylvania - to rid themselves of
the clinging webs of nightmare. They
meet Elena, an 18-year-old, who is
under her father’s thumb: “I can see
how vast and beautiful the world is,
but he puts me in a little glass box,”
she writes. In this sequel, however,
the women give as good as they get,
and it’s not long before Elena, in awe
of Mina, joins the Harkers in Eng¬
land and becomes the babyminder for
little Quincey, their son. Before this,
Elena forms an attachment with a
wolf, in whom (we may suppose) the
vampire has found a more palatable
appearance than that of a bat. Wish-
fulfilments become entangled with
reality. The wolf gets randy, although
it is now not strictly speaking a wolf:
“He leans towards me and I think he
will kiss me; instead he licks my
throat with a long, rough tongue. I
shudder from head to foot with revul¬
sion... and yet I want it to continue.”
Elena enters fugue states, and is
accused of being a witch. She swaps
being servile to her father for being
servile to the wolf, and when the
creature dies she inherits its essence.

In England, Jonathan becomes
suspicious of Elena and her influence
on Quincey. Strange occurrences are
afoot. A cat with no reflection attacks
Harker. Quincey causes his mother’s
mouth to bleed. Harker appears to
his wife in bed with red eyes as they
have sex. (In the sequel, as in the

DARKER ANGELS

original, the fear of sex finds an
expression, thus, from Harker:

“Until this fever leaves us, and is
safely gone, Mina and I can no
longer share a bed.”) Van Helsing
arrives to discuss Mina’s weird
dreams, but then attacks himself
with a knife rather than become one
of the undead. Following a game of
cards, Dracula appears; but who
invited him over the threshold? Mat¬
ters take a turn for the (even) worse
when Quincey is kidnapped, forcing
Mina to examine her loyalties. For
Dracula wants her to follow him if
the boy is to be kept safe...

An apocalyptic showdown is par for
the course, as is (regrettably) the
open invitation for a further sequel.
Stylistically, the present perfect
tense gives many journal entries a
feeling of suspenseful continuation:
nobody knows how it’s going to end.
And if some of the set pieces seem a
little film-friendly, it is because we
know some of the characters so well;
but on the whole this is very good
writing.

F inally we come to the author’s
equivalent of a rock band’s live
album: the recorded reading. Taped
in Los Angeles on August 11, 1997
(although a typo on the back of the
box says 1977), this is Talking in
the Dark: An Evening of Horror
Stories by Ramsey Campbell and
Dennis Etchison. These two veterans
of the performance circuit each read
two of their own stories. Further¬
more, the rock-band analogy seems
apt (the Grateful Dead, perhaps)
because each of the performers
stands aside to let the other take the
solo; the tape runs for two hours and
14 minutes, a respectable concert
length; and some of the onstage ban¬
ter between the two colleagues has
been left intact.

The best story is Etchison’s “The
Dead Cop,” his World Fantasy
Award-nominated tale of gang war¬
fare and the further implications of
gang warfare in L.A. With its deliber¬
ately OTT title, Campbell’s “Kill Me
Hideously” has the fan of a former
horror-porn novelist wanting to be
the star of the author’s written vic¬
tim fantasies. The best single conceit
in the package is in Etchison’s “The
Dog Park,” which shows the shallow¬
ness of Hollywood movie people, and
has these same people meeting in the
park to do business, when before
they had met in detox clinics.

The readings are clear and uncover
veins of humour in the authors’
inflections that might not have
seemed obvious on the page. If you
have difficulty obtaining it in special¬
ist bookshops, it can be bought for
£15 plus £2 p&p from Dark Country
Productions, 2041 N. Beverley Glen
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024,
USA.

David Mathew

February 1998

W ith The Year’s Best Fantasy
and Horror: Tenth Annual
Collection (St Martin’s Griffin,
$29.95), editors Ellen Datlow and
Terri Windling clock up a decade of
presenting their annual choice of the
best fantasy (Windling’s special
responsibility) and horror (Datlow’s).
And this year they’ve come up with a
volume that, though it has its misses,
on balance comes out a winner.

But before getting to the stories you
have to plough through (or fast-for¬
ward past) a hundred or so pages of
summaries of the fantasy and horror
genres for 1996. Now this is all very
worthy, and no doubt downright valu¬
able to the avid fan, but it’s a daunting
barrier to the casual reader and it
would surely be better sited at the tail-
end of the volume.

The story that eventually kick-starts
the anthology, a fantasy (and thus a
Windling choice) is Parke Godwin’s
“The Last Rainbow,” about a pair of
down-at-heel faerie folk who get uncom¬
fortably caught up with a demanding
young lady and her even more demand¬
ing father, the baron. It’s an amusing
and altogether agreeable lead-in to the
more than 40 stories collected here.

Windling has some other worthwhile
choices, such as Patricia A. McKillip’s
“The Witches of Junket,” an evocation of
contemporary suburban witchcraft, and
Charles de Lint’s mature and well-
rounded “Crow Girls.” There’s also the
long, strange, disorientating “Among
the Handlers” by Michael Bishop, which
stays in the mind and does for the
American south what Trainspotting did
for Scotland. “The Reason for Not Going
to the Ball” by Tanith Lee is a short,
shrewd tilt at the Cinderella story, and
Gary Kilworth’s “The Goatboy and the
Giant” is a well-told cautionary tale of
innocent greed and its consequences.

However, there are some we’d happily
have done without. While it may seem
nice to have Romania represented, Ana
Blandiana’s “The Phantom Church” is
sadly ponderous, as is “In the Matter of
the Ukdena” by Bruce Holland Rogers,
about an alternative European conquest
of America. And while Gerald Vizenor’s
Amerindian credentials are impeccable,
“Oshkwiniinag: Heartlines on the Trick¬
ster Express,” is no more fathomable
than the title portends. “Little Beauty’s
Wedding” by Chang Hwang, an offbeat
piece based around Chinese death ritu¬
als, is of curiosity value mostly, and
Patricia C. Wrede’s readable but unre¬
markable “Cruel Sisters” is a fairly con¬
ventional reworking of a folk tale
recounted in the song of the same name,
while Chris Bell’s rambling and ill-disci¬
plined “The Cruel Countess,” about a
bereaved lover’s literal encounter with
fate in a graveyard, is neither plausible
nor off-the-wall enough to work on
either level.

There’s also the compulsory seasoning
of magical realism by Patricia Preciado
Martin and the famous Gabriel Garcia
Marquez: fortunately both stories are

5 *

Annus

Horribilis

Neil Jones and
Neil McIntosh

brief. Which is about all we’d care to say
about the poetry which Windling is
responsible for inflicting on us.

The bulk of Datlow’s horror choices
work well. Terry Dowling’s “Beckoning
Nightframe” is a clever, unnerving and
powerful story of a growing neurosis,
and of the everyday going subtly yet
fundamentally wrong. Dennis Etchi-
son’s “The Dead Cop” carefully builds
an atmosphere of unease so that subur¬
ban LA becomes transformed into a sin¬
ister stalking ground in the
protagonist’s mind: we sense the angles
narrow and the shadows deepen as the
city closes in. Thomas Ligotti’s excel¬
lent “Teatro Grottesco” is a slice of nag¬
ging paranoia, Kafka choreographed by
David Lynch - or if you’d rather,
uniquely Ligotti. In “The Secret of Shih
Tan,” Graham Masterton serves up sex,
cooking and cannibalism in a tasty con¬
coction, although the ending may prove
... a little hard to swallow. Stephen Ded-
man’s edgy “Never Seen By Waking
Eyes” is driven by a fascination with
the works and persona of Lewis
(Charles Dodgson) Carroll: it’s part
A/ice-pastiche, part biography, and part
vampiric/sexual intrigue story that
touches on child sex. Douglas Clegg’s
“O Rare and Most Exquisite” is off-
beam, obscure and haunting, and
Robert Olen Butler’s “JFK Secretly
Attends” is a wry alternative-history
story which sets a damaged but still-
with-us JFK amongst the memories

and memorabilia of his life with Jackie.

Not quite as successful are: Edward
Bryant’s “Disillusion,” which has well-
drawn characters in a tense relation¬
ship but fades badly with its
conspiracy-theory denouement; Kathe
Koja and Barry Malzberg’s “Ursus
Triad,” a very dark reworking of
Goldilocks with not a dollop of porridge
in sight, which is dense, claustropho¬
bic, easy to admire but hard to like;
and A. R. Morlan’s “Warmer,” a dark-
side of rock-and-roll story, all heavy
metal, Svengalis and tortured souls,
and, though a fast ride, rather dull.
Similarly, Susanna Clark’s facsimile of
a Victorian lady novelist in “The Ladies
of Grace Adieu,” mannered and tight-
laced a la Eliot or Austen, is so authen¬
tic it had us wanting to bid it adieu
long before the ending. Robert Silver-
berg collects another paycheck for
“Diana of the Hundred Breasts,” a rou¬
tine “sceptic meddles with dark forces”
yarn, and Terry Lamsley’s overwritten
“Walking the Dog” piles sundry horror
cliches into an unedifying heap.

Then there are the joint choices, par¬
ticularly interesting as they signal
where the genre boundaries might over¬
lap. Jay Russell’s “Lily’s Whisper” is a
simple, rather gentle story of blood ties
that reach beyond the grave, and makes
easy agreeable reading. Philip Bracken’s
“Angel” is a strange, off-kilter tale of
angelic possession which successfully
treads the fine line between revelation
and madness. Michael Marshall Smith’s
“Not Waving” starts out poor - stilted
dialogue, sexist stereotyping and misfir¬
ing attempts at humour - but unexpect¬
edly redeems itself as it finds its stride
halfway through to deliver a not entirely !
expected twist. Delia Sherman’s “The
Witch’s Heart” is a competently written
but dull women-witches-and-wolves
yam, and “Wilderness” by Ron Hansen
was either too clever or too obscure for
us to connect with. On the plus side
there’s “The Snow Pavilion,” Angela
Carter’s last published work, a “lost
traveller/strange mansion” format
which is very well-crafted and emi¬
nently readable, belying its apparent
simplicity.

They’ve also jointly selected the
standout story of the entire collection:
Isobel Carmody’s “The Phoenix,” which
takes us across a tightrope strung
between fantasy and reality via an ado¬
lescent girl’s skewed relationship with
an infant idiot savant. Suburban Aus¬
tralia is cleverly used as the backdrop
for a mythical world which might - or
might not - be real.

The closing story (a Windling choice)
may already be known to sf fans from
its previous inclusion in last year’s
Gardner Dozois Best SF anthology. We
praised it then and we’re happy to do so
again now because Michael Swanwick’s
“Radio Waves” is not only a very fine
story, equally at home in the fantasy/
horror or sf niches but also gives this
excellent anthology a strong send-off.

Neil Jones & Neil McIntosh

- intcrione

T he Portuguese Association of Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers held
their second session of “Encounters” in
Cascais, on the Estoril coast, in the final
week of September 1997. As on the first
occasion in 1996 they produced an
anthology of stories in which English
and Portuguese versions are set back-to-
back. Side Effects edited by Maria
Augusta and Antonio de Macedo (Sime-
tria, Bloco UV--2.0 Piso-Porta 11, Out-
eiro da Vela, 2750 Cascais, Portugal)
contains nine stories and an introduc¬
tion by Luis Filipe Silva. Two of the sto¬
ries were presumably written in
English, one by local resident David
Prescott and the other by the guest-of-
honour at the first Encounters, Joe
Haldeman; one of the others, by Helena
Coelho, was the winner of a competition
sponsored by Simetria and the Cascais
Town Council; the remaining six provide
a showcase for the Portuguese writers
who form the core of the Association.

The sheer size of the English-lan¬
guage market creates opportunities for
writers which simply do not exist in
other languages, even those which have
expanded beyond their original national
bounds. One result of the economic dom¬
inance of English-language publishing is
that while there is a veritable deluge of
translations pouring out of English into
other languages, relatively little trickles
the other way. This effect is even further
exaggerated in mass-market popular fic¬
tion, which is assessed in terms of its
ready accessibility to the domestic audi¬
ence. Even within such nations as Portu¬
gal, therefore, the voices of indigenous
genre writers are likely to be drowned
out by mass-produced imported works,
without any hope of their ever getting
near a level playing field.

This situation is unfortunate in any
case, but it is particularly unfortunate in
the case of science fiction: a genre which
attempts to deal with the future as well
as the present. We now live in a global
community, and if the future is to be
habitable at all we must address the
problems that confront us as global prob¬
lems to be countered on a global scale.
Science fiction which remains content¬
edly parochial in its world-view and ideo¬
logical thrust - as much science fiction
produced under the pressure of Ameri¬
can marketing strategies undoubtedly is
- is more likely to distort our thinking
about such issues than to make a sensi¬
ble and useful contribution to it.

The difficulties inherent in launching
a counterflow against the American
genre-fiction cataract are amply illus¬
trated by this volume, which is by
necessity an amateur production. Some
of the authors have bravely made their
own translations into English; others
have recruited the aid of native
English-speakers, but literary transla¬
tion is an art-form and even the profes¬
sional translator David Prescott - who
writes adequately elegant English on
his own behalf in “Nihil Sine Causa” -
becomes so stubbornly literal in render¬
ing Maria de Menezes’ “Diversified Ped-

Side Effects

Brian Stableford

agogies” and Helena Coelho’s “The
Prophecy of the Water” into English
that they become distinctly stilted.

Such difficulties should not, however,
be allowed to obscure the hard work
that has gone into the collection, nor
the heroic enterprise of the stories
themselves, which remain artful and
fascinating in spite of the grammatical
infelicities which inevitably arise in
word-by-word transmutation from one
language to another.

If they are representative, the stories
here suggest that the Portuguese liter¬
ary tradition has something in common
with the satirical traditions of such
Eastern European nations as the for¬
mer Czechoslovakia. The stories I liked
best were straight-faced but scathingly
sarcastic critiques of contemporary
trends. The most vivid is Joao Bar-
reiros’ “Silent Night,” in which a pla¬
toon of commandos embarks upon a
search-and-destroy mission in Lapland,
hunting down Santa Claus on behalf of
the multinational corporations who
want to keep the commercial spirit of
Christmas intact. From the neat title to
the heartfelt last line the story main¬
tains a bright and steely cutting edge.
Much more sober, but no less effective,
is Maria de Menezes’ account of politi¬
cally correct teachers striving to cope
with the problem of a cannibal child
who grows to gargantuan dimensions
while they are trying to figure out how
to locate the root of his problem and
restrain his antisocial habits while not
making him feel bad about himself.

This story too ends with a beautifully
cruel turnabout.

Co-editor Macedo’s “Tide Effects” is a
blithely absurd and casually erotic tale

-,n pyl ,

problems, each one of which is coun-
tered, in defiantly cavalier fashion, by L > l
a cure worse than the disease. Similar fiT»in
close attention is paid to the declared
theme of the anthology by Luis Filipe
Silva’s “Rodney King,” which is less
melodramatic but equally sharp in its
examination of the manipulative power
of the media and the ways in which
such power tends to burst through con¬
ventional moral boundaries. Silva takes
the risk - and in terms of popular fic¬
tion it always is a risk - of steering his
plot away from apocalyptic violence
towards a much subtler climax, but a
little conscience never comes amiss in
works of art (and in spite of the condem¬
nation of science fiction to the genre
wilderness, it does regularly achieve a
degree of artistry).

David Prescott’s story of reversed
causal flow is the quietest of all the sto¬
ries in the anthology, but is all the
more charming by virtue of the con¬
trast. Brazilian author Gerson Lodi-
Ribeiro - this year’s winner of the
premier Portuguese award for sf - is
represented by “Secondary Mission,”
an abridgement of a novella which pre¬
sumably reads better in its full-length
version. It is the most conventional
offering, being space fiction of a kind
made abundantly familiar by the
American sf of the last 40 years, but it
takes care not only to provide its
exploratory starship with a multina¬
tional crew (as even Americans do
nowadays) but to examine their differ¬
ences in the discussions which supple¬
ment the various unexpected events
and discoveries that the plot throws
up. Given that the other prize-winner,
Helena Coelho, is so young it is hardly
surprising that her story shows faults
of inexperience - most crucially the
failure to provide a plausible scientific
explanation for the phenomena she
describes - but her account of a primi¬
tive alien culture accidentally devas¬
tated by first contact with humans is
written with such feeling and intensity
that it is easy to understand why she
received the award.

The third series of “Encounters” is
planned for next year, after which the
event will probably become biennial. It
is not really a convention, being more a
professional affair than a fanfest, but
everyone interested is welcome and
there is much to recommend it (a beau¬
tiful setting, good food, excellent com¬
pany and lively discussion). It deserves
support and with luck will grow, in
time, to constitute a significant cross-
cultural bridge. Both sets of Encounters
have been subtitled “On the Edge of the
Empire,” ironically reflecting the fact
that the self-billed “Western Edge of
the [Old] World” is only a few miles
from Cascais, but we live in an edgeless
world now, or ought to. These enterpris¬
ing Portuguese writers ought to be wel¬
comed into the very heart of the
international science fiction community.

Brian Stableford

February 1998

63

NOVEMBER

1997

The following is a list of all sf, fantasy
and horror titles, and books of related
interest, received by Interzone during
the month specified above. Official
publication dates, where known, are
given in italics at the end of each entry.
Descriptive phrases in quotes following
titles are taken frcm book covers
rather than title pages. A listing here
does not preclude a separate review in
this issue (or in a future issue) of the
magazine.

Applegate, K. A. The Capture.
"Animorphs, 6.” Scholastic/Hippo,
ISBN 0-590-19643-X, 154pp, B-
format paperback, £3.99. (juvenile
sf/horror novel, first published in
the USA, 1997.) Nbvember 1997.
Attanasio, A. A. Centuries. “The
towering novel of the next Millen¬
nium.” New English Library, ISBN
0-340-66600-5, 437pp, A-format
paperback, cover by Bob Warner,
£6.99. (Sf novel, first published in
1997; reviewed by Chris Gilmore
in Interzone 125 and by John Clute
in Interzone 126.) 18th December
1997.

Balzac, Honore de. The Quest
of the Absolute. Translated by
Ellen Marriage. Afterword by
Christopher Smith. Dedalus, ISBN
1-873982-58-5, 226pp [plus
Chronology and Afterword on
unnumbered pages], B-format
paperback, £6.99. (Horror novel,
first published in France as Le
Recherche de I’absolu, 1834; pub¬
lished previously by Dedalus in
1989, this is their second printing
[or “new edition,” as they call it];
the classic tale of an obsessed
alchemist, it was written by Balzac
during his annus mirabilis of 1834
when, in short order, he also pro¬
duced what are probably his two
most famous realistic novels,
Eugenie Grandet and Le Pere Gor'iot
[this “etude philosophique” was, it
seems, sandwiched between the
two]; we’re not told the prove¬
nance of this translation, but it

clearly dates from before 1989.)

8th January 1998.

Burton, LeVar. Aftermath. Vista,
ISBN 0-575-60371-2, xii+274pp,
A-format paperback, £5.99. (Sf
novel, first published in the USA,
1997; a debut novel by an actor
who has appeared in US TV
shows from Roots to Star Trek: The
Next Generation.) 20th November
1997.

Byrne, Eugene, and Kim Newman.
Back in the USSA. Mark V.
Ziesing [PO Box 76, Shingletown,
CA 96088, USA], ISBN 0-929480-
84-8, 356pp, hardcover, cover by
Arnie Fenner, $29.95. (Alterna¬
tive-world humorous sf novel, first
edition; it consists of a series of
linked stories which first appeared
in Interzone - all bar one, the con¬
cluding story, “On the Road,”
which is original to the book; we
think it’s very clever stuff, obvi¬
ously.) No date shown: possibly an
October publication, but received
from the authors in November 1997.
Cannon, Peter. Long Memories:
Recollections of Frank Belk¬
nap Long. Afterword by Ramsey
Campbell. British Fantasy Society
[2 Harwood St., Stockport SK4
1JJ], ISBN 0-952-4153-1-3, 68pp,
paperbound, £5 [plus 50p postage
& packing in the UK]. (Biographi¬
cal reminiscences about the old
age of the well-known American
sf/horror writer; first edition; this
is a fascinating but sad item: Frank
Long, who had been H. P. Love-
craft’s right-hand man in the
1920s, lived well into his 80s, his
career as a professional author
largely over after the heyday of
the pulps and the waning of the
paperback-original boom of the
1950s and 1960s; he lived with his
eccentric wife Lyda in near¬
poverty, in New York City, and
this nicely-written, A5-size, sta¬
pled booklet tells the tale from
the point of view of one of those
who attempted to care for him in
the last years.) Late entry: October
(?) publication, received in November
1997.

Chapman, Vera. The
Enchantresses. Gollancz, ISBN
0-575-06524-9, 223pp, hardcover,
cover by Harvey Parker, £16.99.
(Arthurian fantasy novel, first edi¬
tion; proof copy received; Vera
Chapman died a couple of years
ago at the ripe old age of 98, and
this posthumous book has been
edited for publication by Mike
Ashley [who has also published
short stories and extracts by her
in his anthologies of recent
years].) 8th January 1998.

Clarke, I. F„ ed. The Great War
with Germany, 1890-1914:
Fictions and Fantasies of the

War-to-come. “Liverpool Sci¬
ence Fiction Texts and Studies.”
Liverpool University Press, ISBN
0-85323-642-9, xv+440pp, trade
paperback, cover by Michael Mat-
tingley, £12.95. (Sf anthology, first
edition; there is a simultaneous
hardcover edition [not seen]; a
follow-up to the same editor’s The
Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-
1914 [1995], it contains stories
and extracts [mainly the latter]
from future-war fictions by Ersk-
ine Childers, Robert William
Cole, Admiral Colomb, Headon
Hill, William Le Queux, W. Heath
Robinson, Saki, Louis Tracy, P. G.
Wodehouse [!], Walter Wood and
many others, including a number
of German writers translated here
for the first time; I would question
the wisdom of including extracts
from such well-known [and gener¬
ally available] novels as Childers’s
The Riddle of the Sands and Saki’s
When William Came, but, that
quibble aside, this is another
excellent, scholarly anthology by
Professor Clarke: recommended.)
Late entry: states “28 October” on
the review slip, but received in
November 1997.

Farmer, Philip Jose. The World
of Tiers, Volume Two: Behind
the Walls of Terra, The
Lavalite World, More Than
Fire. Tor, ISBN 0-312-86377-2,
544pp, trade paperback, cover by
Boris Vallejo, $19.95. (Sf/fantasy
omnibus, first edition; the three
novels, “pocket-universe” adven¬
tures mainly concerning the hero
Kickaha, were first published sep¬
arately in 1970,1977 and 1993;
presumably there has been a
Warld of Tiers, Volume One from
the same publisher in the recent
past, but we were not sent a
copy.) 12th December 1997.
Feintuch, David. Voices of Hope.
“The epic Seafort Saga continues.”
Orbit, ISBN 1-85723-516-9,

527pp, A-format paperback, cover
by Stephen Youll, £5.99. (Sf novel,
first published in the USA, 1996;
fifth in the sub-Horatio Horn-
blower space-opera series which
began with Midshipman’s Hope.)

6th November 1997.

Gier, Scott G. First Victory:
Genellan, Book 3. Del Rey,

ISBN 0-345-40450-5,433pp, A-
format paperback, cover by Bob
Eggleton, $5.99. (Sf novel, first
edition; we saw the first volume
of this planetary-romance series a
couple of years ago, but we seem
to have missed book two, which
was called In the Shadow of the
Moon.) 1st November 1997.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Questioning
the Millennium: A Rational¬
ist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbi¬
trary Countdown. Cape, ISBN

0-224-04389-7, 190pp, hardcover,
£12.99. (Brief study [preface and
three longish chapters] of the
coming Millennium and its calen-
drical conundrums; first published
in the USA, 1997; an elegant little
book by one of the world’s best
science writers, it’s dedicated: “In
loving memory of my friend Carl
Sagan.”) No date shown: received in
Navember 1997.

Grant, Richard. In the Land of
Winter. Avon, ISBN 0-380-
97465-7, 340pp, hardcover, cover
by Mary Grandpre, $24. (Fantasy
novel, first edition; the author’s
last novel, Tex and Molly in the
Afterlife [which we never saw]
seems to have garnered a lot of
praise.) Late entry: 8th October pub¬
lication, received in November 1997.
Hambly, Barbara. Icefalcon’s
Quest. Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-
39724-X, 307pp, hardcover, $24.
(Fantasy novel, first edition; proof
copy received.) February 1998.
Harper, Tara K. Wolf’s Bane.

Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-40634-6,
344pp, A-format paperback, cover
by Eric Peterson, $5.99. (Sf/fantasy
novel, first edition; it’s the fifth in
a series [future-set, on an invaded
Earth, and involving telepathy]
called “Tales of the Wolves”; ear¬
lier volumes, only the last of
which we saw, were entitled
WaKwalker, Shadow Leader, Storm
Runner and Q-ayheart [1996].) 1st
Navember 1997.

Jones, Stephen, ed. Dark of the
Night: New Tales of Horror
and the Supernatural. Illus¬
trated by Randy Broecker. Pump¬
kin Books [PO Box 297,
Nottingham NG2 4GW], ISBN 1-
901914-01-1, 306pp, hardcover,
£15.99. (Horror anthology, first
edition; there is a simultaneous
signed, slipcased edition priced at
£25 [not seen]; yet another Steve
Jones anthology, from yet another
new publisher; it’s a nicely-pro¬
duced volume with all-new stories
by Stephen Baxter, Ramsey Camp¬
bell, David Case, Christopher
Fowler, Stephen Laws, Paul J.
McAuley, Richard Christian Math-
eson, Kim Newman, Nicholas
Royle, Michael Marshall Smith,
Douglas E. Winter and others.)
Late entry: 30th October publication,
received in November 1997.
Kearney, Paul. The Heretic
Kings: Book 2 of The Monar¬
chies of God. Vista, ISBN 0-575-
60186-8, 320pp, A-format
paperback, cover by Steve Crisp,
£5.99. (Fantasy novel, first pub¬
lished in 1996; reviewed by Paul
Brazier in Interzone 117.) 20th
November 1997.

Koontz, Dean. Fear Nothing.
Headline, ISBN 0-7472-2055-7,

373pp, hardcover, £16.99. (Hor¬
ror/suspense novel, first edition
[?]; Headline seem to have
stopped sending us their Dean
Koontz books as a matter of
course; apparently they did a new,
revised edition of his 1970s sf
novel Demon Seed recently, but we
never saw that; nor have we seen
a finished copy, or a paperback, of
his last new novel, Sole Survivor.)
11th December 1997.

Lee, Tanith. Vivia. Warner, ISBN
0-7515-2135-3, 395pp, A-format
paperback, cover by Charles
August Mengin, £6.99.
(Horror/fantasy novel, first pub¬
lished in 1995.) 4th December
1997.

Le Guin, Ursula K. A Fisherman
of the Inland Sea. Illustrated by
Michael Storrings. Vista, ISBN 0-
575-60239-2,191 pp, A-format
paperback, cover by Steve Crisp,
£5.99. (Sf collection, first pub¬
lished in the USA, 1994; reviewed
by Ken Brown in Interzone 122.)
11th December 1997.

Lovegrove, James. Days.
Orion/Phoenix, ISBN 0-75380-
228-7, 329pp, B-format paperback,
£6.99. (Sf/horror novel, first edi-
I tion; Lovegrove’s second solo
novel, following The Hope [1990]

- that one was about a giant ship,
while this one is about a giant
department store.) 17th November
1997.

Lumley, Brian. The House of
Doors: Second Visit. Hodder &
Stoughton, ISBN 0-340-70823-9,
408pp, hardcover, cover by
George Underwood, £16.99.
(Horror novel, first edition; a
sequel to The House of Doors
[1990].) 4th December 1997.
McCaffrey, Anne. Black Horses
for the King. Del Rey, ISBN 0-
345-40881-0, 217pp, B-format
paperback, cover by David Shan¬
non, $10.95. (Juvenile Arthurian
historical novel, first published in
1996; we haven’t seen this before,
but apparently there was a US
hardcover edition last year; it’s an
expansion of the short story
“Black Horses for a King” which
originally appeared in Jane Yolen’s
Camelot anthology [1995]; basi¬
cally a tale about the shoeing of
Lord Artos’s horses, it seems to
have no overt fantasy content.)
Late entry: 1st September publica¬
tion, received in November 1997.
McDonald, Ian. Sacrifice of
Fools. Vista, ISBN 0-575-60059-4,
286pp, A-format paperback, cover
by Mike Posen, £5.99. (Sf novel,
first published in 1996; reviewed
by Paul McAuley in Interzone 118.)
11th December 1997.

Martin, George R. R. A Game of
Thrones: Book One of A Song
of Ice and Fire. Voyager, ISBN 0-
00-647988-X, 694pp, A-format
paperback, cover by Jim Burns,
£6.99. (Fantasy novel, first pub¬
lished in 1996; a blockbuster, in
standard heroic-fantasy mould, by
an author hitherto best known for
his sf, his TV scripts and his “Wild
Cards” shared-world anthologies;
reviewed by Gwyneth Jones in
Interzone 112.) 5th January 1998.
Matheson, Richard. I Am Leg¬
end. Tor/Orb, ISBN 0-312-86504-
X, 317pp, trade paperback,

$12.95. (Sf/horror novel, first pub¬
lished in the USA, 1954; first pub¬
lication in this omnibus form,

1995; this attractive reissue of
Matheson’s best-known novel
[about to be filmed yet again, the
publishers tell us, with Arnold
Schwarzenegger in the lead] also
contains ten short stories, ranging
in original copyright date from
1951 to 1989.) Late entry: 20th
October publication, received in
November 1997.

Meynard, Yves. The Book of
Knights. Tor, ISBN 0-312-86482-
5, 222pp, hardcover, $21.95. (Fan¬
tasy novel, first edition; proof
copy received; the author is
French-Canadian, writer of half a
dozen books to date, and this is
described as “his first fantasy
novel written in English”; rather
oddly, the publishers bill him as “a
new voice, powerful and distinct...
from the culture that created the
literary fairy tale and the courtly
romance”; well, we know what
they mean, but surely there was
never anything particularly Que-
becois about the French comes des
fees...?) February 1998.

Mirbeau, Octave. Torture Gar¬
den. Translated by Michael
Richardson. Introduction by Brian
Stableford. Dedalus, ISBN 1-
873982-53-4, 206pp, B-format
paperback, £7.99. (Horror novel,
first published in France as Le
Jardin des supplices, 1899; a philo¬
sophical tale of terror, and a clas¬
sic of the perverse, it was
published previously in English by
Dedalus in a different translation,
1990 [from which year Stable-
ford’s introduction dates]; this
new translation, which first
appeared in 1995 and of which
this is the second printing, drops
the definite article from the
novel’s title.) 8th January 1998.
Moorcock, Michael. The War
Amongst the Angels: An
Autobiographical Story. Avon,
ISBN 0-380-97597-1, 298pp, hard¬
cover, cover by Bill Binger, $24.
(Sf/fantasy novel, first published in
the UK, 1996; the follow-up to

Blood and Fabulous Harbours, it’s
dedicated to the memories of
Harrison Ainsworth, Captain Mar-
ryat, George Meredith and Gerald
Kersh - a mixed bunch!; reviewed
by Chris Gilmore in Interzone
114.) 5th November 1997.

Moore, Alan. Voice of the Fire.
“A dark midwinter tale from the
heart of England.” Indigo, ISBN 0-
575-40055-2, 320pp, B-format
paperback, cover by Robert
Mason, £5.99. (Collection of
linked stories by a leading sf/fan¬
tasy graphic novelist; first pub¬
lished in 1996; Moore’s
long-awaited debut “novel,” a
sequence of tales strung along a
6,000-year timeline in the Mid¬
lands city of Northampton, it’s
written in an intense, poetic man¬
ner, at times reminiscent of Rus¬
sell Hoban’s Riddley Walka\ at
times of lain Sinclair’s London
novels; uncompromisingly “local,"
and as “English" as Garner or
Holdstock; reviewed by Gwyneth
Jones in Interzone 116.) 20th
November 1997.

Nicholls, Stan. The Shadow of
the Sorcerer. “The second book
in the exciting trilogy. The Night¬
shade Chronicles.” Point Fantasy,
ISBN 0-590-13971-1, 245pp, A-
format paperback, cover by David
Wyatt, £3.99. (Young-adult fantasy
novel, first edition.) November
1997.

Pepper, Mark. Man on a Murder
Cycle. Hodder & Stoughton,

ISBN 0-340-69623-0, 404pp, hard¬
cover, £16.99. (Horror novel, first
edition; the author’s second novel,
following The ShortCut [1996].)
28th November 1997.

Peyton, K. M. Unquiet Spirits.
Scholastic Press, ISBN 0-590-
54231-1, 216pp, B-format paper¬
back, cover by Michael Mascaro,
£4.99. (Juvenile horror novel, first
edition.) November 1997.

Rankin, Robert. The Brentford
Chainstore Massacre. “The
fifth novel in the now legendary
Brentford Trilogy.” Doubleday,
ISBN 0-385-40707-6, 269pp, hard¬
cover, cover by Ian Murray,

£16.99. (Humorous fantasy novel,
first edition.) 11th December 1997.
Rankin, Robert. Sprout Mask
Replica. Corgi, ISBN 0-552-
14356-1, 351pp, A-format paper¬
back, cover by Ian Murray, £5.99.
(Humorous fantasy novel, first
published in 1997.) 11th December
1997.

Rees, Celia. The Vanished. Point
Horror, ISBN 0-590-19535-2,
244pp, A-format paperback,

£3.50. (Young-adult horror novel,
first edition.) November 1997.

Rice, Anne. The Feast of All
Saints. Arrow, ISBN 0-09-
926947-3, 640pp, A-format
paperback, £5.99. (Historical
“gothic” novel, first published
in the USA, 1979; there was a
previous UK paperback edition
from Penguin Books [1982].) 4th
December 1997.

Scott, Melissa. Night Sky Mine.
Tor, ISBN 0-312-86156-7, 384pp,
trade paperback, $14.95. (Sf novel,
first published in the USA, 1996;
reviewed by Gwyneth Jones in
Interzone 113.) 18th November
1997.

Staig, Laurence. Technofear: A
Collection of Tales of Tomor¬
row. Scholastic Press, ISBN 0-
590-54230-3,154pp, B-format
paperback, £4.99. (Juvenile sf col¬
lection, first edition; it contains
seven stories, all presumably origi¬
nal to the book.) November 1997.
Stasheff, Christopher. My Son,
the Wizard: Book V of A Wiz¬
ard in Rhyme. Del Rey, ISBN 0-
345-37602-1, 297pp, B-format
paperback, cover by Daniel Horn,
$11.95. (Fantasy novel, first edi¬
tion.) 1st November 1997.

Stine, R. L. Goosebumps TV
Special 5: My Hairiest Adven¬
ture, It Came From Beneath
the Sink! “2 Goosebumps books
as seen on BBC TV”
Scholastic/Hippo, ISBN 0-590-
19868-8, 240pp, B-format paper¬
back, £4.99. (Juvenile horror
omnibus, first edition; the novels
originally were published sepa¬
rately in the USA, in 1994 and
1995; both are copyright
“Parachute Press, Inc.”) November
1997.

Stine, R. L. How to Kill a Mon¬
ster. “Goosebumps, 46.” Scholas¬
tic/Hippo, ISBN 0-590-19645-6,
114pp, B-format paperback, £3.99.
(Juvenile horror novel, first pub¬
lished in the USA, 1996; it is copy¬
right “Parachute Press, Inc.’’)
November 1997.

Tepper, Sheri S. Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall. Voyager, ISBN
0-00-648268-6, 465pp, A-format
paperback, cover by Stuart Bodek,
£6.99. (Sf/fantasy novel, first pub¬
lished in the USA, 1996; reviewed
by Gwyneth Jones in Interzone
112.) 1st December 1997.

Tolkien, J. R. R. Roverandom.
Edited by Christina Scull and
Wayne G. Hammond. Harper-
Collins, ISBN 0-261-10353-9,
xxii+106pp, hardcover, cover by
the author, £12.99. (Juvenile fan¬
tasy novella, first edition; illus¬
trated with five plates of drawings
and paintings by the author; writ¬
ten for his young son in 1925, this
fairy tale about a dog is published

February 1998

65

J| here for the first time and thus
|i represents yet another "last”
H| Tolkien book; the actual text
■I fills about 85 pages, and there
J are copious notes by the edi¬
tors.) 5th January 1998.

Waitman, Katie. The Merro
Tree. “Del Rey Discovery of the
Year." Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-41436-
5, 437pp, A-format paperback,
cover by Cliff Nielsen, $5.99. (Sf
novel, first edition; a debut novel
by a new American writer [her
name is given as Katharine L.
Waitman in the copyright state¬
ment], it’s about art and censor¬
ship in a future galactic setting.)
Late entry: 1st October publication,
received in November 1997.

Webb, Wendy, and Charles Grant,
eds. Gothic Ghosts. Tor, ISBN
0-312-86130-3, 256pp, hardcover,
$23.95. (Horror anthology, first
edition; it contains all-new tales, in
a traditional “ghost-story” vein, by
Matthew J. Costello, Esther M.
Friesner, Rick Hautala, Nancy
Holder, Rick Kennet, Kathryn
Ptacek, Carrie Richerson, Jessica
Amanda Salmonson, Brian Stable-
ford, Brad Strickland, Lucy Taylor,
Robert E. Vardeman and others.)
12th November 1997.

Weis, Margaret, and Don Perrin.
Hung Out. Gollancz, ISBN 0-
575-06170-7, 384pp, hardcover,
cover by Les Edwards, £16.99. (Sf
novel, first edition [?]; proof copy

received; a third novel about Xris
Cyborg and his Mag Force 7 team,
in the adventure series which
began with The Knights of the Black
Earth and Robot Blues.) 8th January
1998.

Williams, Michael. Allamanda.
New English Library, ISBN 0-340-
67449-0, 436pp, A-format paper¬
back, cover by Mick van Houten,
£6.99. (Fantasy novel, first pub¬
lished in the USA, 1997; a follow¬
up to the author’s previous book,
Arcady.) 4th December 1997.
Winter, Douglas E., ed. Millen¬
nium. Voyager, ISBN 0-00-
649833-7, 627pp, A-format
paperback, £6.99. (Horror anthol¬
ogy, first published in the USA as

S pino ffery _

This is a list of all books received that fall into those sub-types of sf, fan¬
tasy and horror which may be termed novelizations, recursive fictions,
spinoffs, sequels by other hands, shared worlds and sharecrops (includ¬
ing non-fiction about shared worlds, films and TV, etc.). The collective
term “Spinoffery” is used for the sake of brevity.

Bassom, David. Creating Baby¬
lon 5. Foreword by J. Michael
Straczynski. Del Rey, ISBN 0-345-
41452-7, 143pp, very large-format
paperback, $18. (Copiously illus¬
trated companion to sf television
series created by J. Michael
Straczynski; first published in the
UK, 1996.) Late entry: 3rdOctober
publication, received in November
1997.

Emerson, Ru. The Empty
Throne. “Xena: Warrior
Princess.” HarperCollins, ISBN 0-
00-651150-3, 231 pp, A-format
paperback, £5.99. (Fantasy TV-
series spinoff novel, first published
in the USA, 1996; it’s based on the
pseudo-Greek mythological series
[a companion to Hercules: The Leg¬
endary Journeys] created by John
Schulian and Robert Tapert.) 1st
December 1997.

Howard, Stella. Prophecy of
Darkness. “Xena: Warrior
Princess.” HarperCollins, ISBN 0-
00-651149-X, 215pp, A-format
paperback, £5.99. (Fantasy TV-
series spinoff novel, first published
in the USA, 1997; based on the
series created by John Schulian
and Robert Tapert; this one has
very much larger print, and is
therefore considerably shorter,
than the first novel in the
sequence [see under Ru Emerson,
above].) 1st December 1997.
Jordan, Robert, and Teresa Patter¬
son. The World of Robert Jor¬
dan’s The Wheel of Time.
Orbit, ISBN 1-85723-505-3,

304pp, hardcover, cover by Ellisa
Mitchell, £25. (Copiously illus¬
trated, large-format companion to
the series of fantasy novels by Jor¬
dan; first published in the USA,
1997; the artwork is by Todd
Cameron Hamilton, John M. Ford,
Tom Canty, Darrell K. Sweet and
others; this is a Bill Fawcett &
Associates packaged book;
“Robert Jordan” [real name James

Rigney, Jr„ born 1948] has come a
long way from the days when he
was a mere writer of “Conan”
spinoffs: he is now, quite possibly,
the best-selling fantasy novelist in
the world.) 13th November 1997.
McCaffrey, Anne, and Margaret
Ball. Acorna: The Unicorn
Girl. Corgi, ISBN 0-552-14621-8,
415pp, A-format paperback, cover
by Fred Gambino, £5.99. (Sf novel,
first published in the USA, 1997;
this is possibly a sharecrop - i.e.
written by Ball with McCaffrey’s
indulgence.) 9th January 1998.
Miller, Rand, with David
Wingrove. Myst: The Book of
D’Ni. Bantam Press, ISBN 0-593-
04026-0, 318pp, hardcover,

£17.99. (Fantasy novel, based on a
CD-ROM game, first published in
the USA, 1997; Rand Miller is the
game’s creator, and Wingrove
probably has written the book;
third in the series that began with
Myst The Book of Atrus [1995]; it’s
a strange-looking thing, sans dust-
jacket and printed on artificially
“browned” paper in order to
resemble some old grimoire.) 11th
December 1997.

Miller, Rand, with David
Wingrove. Myst: The Book of
Ti’ana. Corgi, ISBN 0-552-
14387-1,478pp, A-format paper¬
back, £5.99. (Fantasy novel, based
on a CD-ROM game, first pub¬
lished in the USA, 1996; second in
the series that began with Myst
The Book of Atrus [1995]; presum¬

ably there was a UK hardcover
edition in 1996, but we were not
sent it.) 13th November 1997.
Pratchett, Terry. Soul Music:

The Illustrated Screenplay.
“Terry Pratchett’s Discworld."
Corgi, ISBN 0-552-14556-4,

127pp, large-format paperback,
£9.99. (TV-serial script, based on
the 1994 humorous fantasy novel
by Pratchett; first edition; the
script is for the second of two
animated serials produced within
the last year by Channel Four
Television/Cosgrove Hall Films [if
a similar “illustrated screenplay”
has been published for the first
serial, Vtyrd Sisters, we have not
been sent it]; it’s not clear who
actually wrote this script - Pratch¬
ett himself?; more likely it’s by
Martin Jameson, whose name is
given in small print on the back
cover as “adapter” of the TV ver¬
sion; nor is it clear who the car-
toony-style illustrations are by -
not a single artist is named, but
presumably the pictures are a
Cosgrove Hall team effort under
the guidance of producer and
director Jean Flynn.) 11th Decem¬
ber 1997.

Ramer, Samuel. Coping With
Your Trekkie: What You
Need to Know to Survive a
Relationship With a Star Trek
Fanatic. Headline, ISBN 0-7472-
7642-0, xviii+235pp, trade paper¬
back, £7.99. (Humorous primer,
or “bluffer’s guide,” to the Star
Trek TV series and its spinoffs;

Revelations, 1997; all-original sto¬
ries which explore “the workings
of the human heart in the ten
decades that comprise the twenti¬
eth century”; the contributors
include Clive Barker, Poppy Z.
Brite, Ramsey Campbell, Charles
Grant, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth
Massie, David Morrell, Whitley
Strieber and F. Paul Wilson;
reviewed by David Mathew in
Interzone 123.) 1st December 1997.
Wylie, Jonathan. Magister. Orbit,
ISBN 1-85723-515-0, 388pp, A-
format paperback, £6.99. (Fantasy
novel, first edition; inspired by the
life of the composer Arnold Bax;
“Jonathan Wylie” is a pseudonym
of Mark and Julia Smith.) 4th
December 1997.

first published in the USA, 1997; it
is unillustrated and unauthorized.)
13th January “1997” (i.e. 1998).
Shapiro, Marc. What’s Your X-
Files I.Q.?: Over 1000 Ques¬
tions and Answers for Every
X-Files Trivia Buff. Headline,
ISBN 0-7472-5940-2, x+150pp, B-
format paperback, £5.99. (Quiz-
book keyed to the sf/horror TV
series The X-Files; first published in
the USA, 1997.) 13th January
“1997” (i.e. 1998).

Stoker, Bram. Dracula, or The
Un-Dead: A Play in Prologue
and Five Acts. Edited by Sylvia
Starshine. Pumpkin Books [PO
Box 297, Nottingham NG2
4GW], ISBN 1-901914-04-6,
xxxix+277pp, hardcover, £16.99.
(Horror dramatization, based on
the novel Dracula [1897]; first edi¬
tion; there is a simultaneous
signed [by the editor], slipcased
edition priced at £27.50 [not
seen]; there are eight pages of
photographs; this is a labour of
love on Sylvia Starshine’s part; an
exhaustively transcribed and
annotated edition of the only sur¬
viving copy of Bram Stoker’s dra¬
matized version of Dacula, held
by the British Library in the Lord
Chamberlain’s Play List for 1897;
the play did enjoy a few perfor¬
mances at the time, though they
were not adjudged a success.) Late
entry: 30th October publication,
received in November 1997.

Zahn, Timothy. Specter of the
Past. “Star Wars." Bantam Press,
ISBN 0-593-03990-4, 344pp, hard¬
cover, cover by Drew Struzan,
£12.99. (Sf movie-series spinoff
novel, first published in the USA,

1997; the American edition was
billed as “The Hand of Thrawn,
Book 1,” though this UK edition is
not so described.) 11th December
1997.

ALBEDO ONE: WINNER OF EURO¬
PEAN SCIENCE FICTION AWARD

and Small Press Magazine of the Year. Joe
Haldeman and Terry Brooks interviewed in
#15. Fiction by Spinrad, VanderMeer, etc.
Letters, reviews, comment. Submissions wel¬
come. £25 for best story. £3 (or four-issue
sub £10): Albedo One, 2 Post Road, Lusk, Co.
Dublin, Ireland.

SCI-FINDER. Register your web site at
http://www.sf-fantasy.com/sfind.htm — the ded¬
icated SF/F search engine.

QUALIFIED SECRETARY (Royal Society
of Arts) offers word-processing and proof¬
reading services on manuscripts of any
length. Phone Barbara Stone: (01843)
590502.

DAVID LANGFORD is always seeking
weird and wonderful sf gossip for his IZ col¬
umn, and can be contacted at 94 London
Rd„ Reading RG1 5AU (e-mail to
ansible@cix.co.uk; visit his web site at
http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk).
FANTASTIC LITERATURE. Large, regu¬
lar catalogues of quality science fiction, fan¬
tasy and horror for sale. Free lists: write
now to Fantastic Literature, 35 The Ram¬
parts, Rayleigh, Essex SS6 8PY.

SMALL ADS

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Have you a manuscript that needs just that
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27 Salisbury St., Bedford MK41 7RE.
BARRINGTON BAYLEY: trade paper¬
back editions of Empire of TwaWorlds, Annihi¬
lation Factor (novels) and Seed of Evil
(collection), £5 each (inland, inc. p&p), signed
and personalized, from 48 Turreff Avenue,
Telford, Shropshire TF2 8HE.

BOOKS - MAIL ORDER. Orbital Trading
Post: the planet’s largest on-line SF/F book¬
shop at http://www.sf-fantasy.com/otp.htm - up
to 40% off RRP!

SF, HORROR, FANTASY paperback
firsts/collectibles US & UK. Specialists in
Howard, Burroughs, Dick, Brunner, Moorcock,
Lovecraft, Doc Savage, Shadow, Pulp Heroes,
but all pre-1980 authors represented. Send 50p
SAE or $2 cash for catalogues: Zardoz Books,
20 Whitecroft, Dilton Marsh, Westbury, Wilt¬
shire BA13 4DJ.

HUGO AWARD-winning Science Fiction
Chronicle, published since 1979, has all the
news of US and UK publishing, plus reviews,
interviews, forthcoming books, much, much
more. Sample copy £3.50, subscription 12/£29
airmail from Algol Press, do R. Hansen, 144
Plashet Grove, E. Ham, London E6 1AB.
HARM’S WAY - “What if Charles Dickens
had written a space opera?” (Locus) - large
paperback, £3.50. The Hour of the Thin Ox and
Other Voices, paperbacks, £1.50 each. Prices
include postage. Colin Greenland, 98 Sturton
St., Cambridge CB1 2QA
BRIGHTON AREA readers of Interzone are
welcome to join us on Friday nights at The
Mitre, a friendly pub on Baker Street (near
the Open Market). A few of us meet from 9-
11 pm, in the smaller of the two rooms, for
informal drink and chat. You'll recognize us by
the copies of IZ or other sf publications lying
around - so come along and make yourselves
known. (Editors.)

SMALL ADS in Interzone reach 10,000 peo¬
ple. If you wish to advertise please send your
ad copy, together with payment, to Interzone,
217 Preston Drove, Brighton BN1 6FL, UK.
Rates: 25 pence per word, minimum often
words, discount of 10% for insertions
repeated in three issues (VAT is inclusive).

Interzone 1997 Popularity Poll

It’s time once again for our annual
popularity poll, so we’d be grateful if readers
could let us know their thoughts on the
contents of issues 115 to 126 inclusive
(no need to wait until you’ve read the latest
two issues, as they will count towards next
year’s poll). We’d appreciate it if you could
send us answers to the following questions.
Write or type your replies on any piece of
paper and send them to us before the
deadline of 1st April 1998.

1) Which stories in Interzone issues 115-126
inclusive (i.e. those with a 1997 cover
date) did you particularly like?

2) Which stories in Interzone issues 115-126
inclusive did you particularly dislike (if
any)?

Any further comments about our non-fiction
articles and illustrations, or any other aspect
of the magazine, would also be most welcome.
We’ll report the results later in the year.

& u

COMING NEXT MONTH

A couple of surprise “celebrity” names make their

jpijfl iy|p|

first-ever appearances in Interzone. There will also
be excellent stories by regulars Sarah Ash and

Eric Brown, and another provocative article by our
new US columnist Gary Westfahl. Plus all our
usual features and reviews. So watch out for the
March Interzone, number 129, on sale in February.

FORGET WORD PROCESSING

THIS IS THE WORLD OF
CONSCIOUSNESS PROCESSING

ALEXANDER BES

‘This is a hook destined to become a ck

‘Not since NeurOMANCER has there
been so spellbinding a debut novel*

Starburst

‘We find Besber’s vision not only
entertaining but increasingly likely

MacPower Magazine

http://wyvw.orbitbooks.'co.uk